This shouldn’t be a factor in 2024.
Lamoriello has enforced quite a lot of guidelines on his gamers all through his numerous entrance workplace stops in New Jersey, Toronto and, now, New York and refuses to provide an inch on nearly all of them. Facial hair shouldn’t be allowed throughout the common season, hair can’t contact the collar of the jersey and no jewellery is allowed.
He additionally has a weird rule about not permitting gamers to put on excessive jersey numbers. That is the one one he appears to point out some flexibility with as he allowed gamers like Jaromir Jagr and Alexander Mogilny to maintain their excessive numbers as a present of respect for what that they had completed within the NHL.
These guidelines are nearly an identical to what the New York Yankees have enforced on their gamers because the mid-Seventies beneath former proprietor George Steinbrenner, the place gamers aren’t allowed to have beards or have hair that extends to their jersey collars.
The mindset is for everyone to look uniform, {and professional}, and presentable, a clean-cut picture, so to talk. However what it is actually about is management. It is a approach for power-hungry executives — which Lamoriello has all the time been — to micromanage each small element of his workforce and his roster. It’s to chop out the individuality of each participant on the roster.
Sure, Duclair was nearly definitely conscious of the principles when he selected to signal with the Islanders. He didn’t must signal there if it was an excessive amount of of an issue. However that takes away from the absurdity of those arbitrary and archaic restrictions.
Perhaps there was a time when that form of factor labored. Even then it’s debatable. If that point did exist, it has lengthy since handed. It is nonetheless a workforce sport, however permitting gamers to be themselves and have their very own id can also be essential to right now’s gamers.
This degree of micromanagement and energy grabs does nothing to additional a workforce’s skill to win, and if something it’d even hold gamers from eager to signal there.
Lamoriello constructed a powerhouse with the Devils within the mid-Nineties by the early 2000s, however he has not likely discovered continued, sustained success — and definitely not championship degree success — in practically 20 years. Maybe that alone ought to make him attempt to rethink what he’s doing.
It isn’t like the present system is producing outcomes.