I swear the people with negative comments are just reading into his time with the Whalers and blocking off all other sources of information like being the runner up to the Wild and Canadiens jobs as well as the fact it is literally 20 years later. Why people would want to pretend that people don't change after 20 years is beyond me.
The problems in Hartford were two-fold; his personality, and his ability as a coach.
The McGuire described in Hartford is an amateurish, immature and ridiculously arrogant clown whose personality caused him to exit stage right with the animosity of everyone involved.
I have no doubt that this Pierre McGuire has changed, mellowed out as he grew older.
But...he was also an awful coach. It's not as if Hartford was winning games and suddenly everyone started tanking to get rid of the guy. Being good at your job will give you a lot of leeway in the personality department (see the professional bully that was Scotty Bowman), and Pierre McGuire was NOT good at his job. He combined perhaps the two worst qualities in being a Head Coach of a professional sports team into one awful package.
Spending the last 20 years on TV overrating prospects and ranting about his latest man-crush doesn't really seem like the kind of place to pick up coaching acumen, of which McGuirre started with negative of.
As for being a GM, yes, McGuirre is knowledgeable. So are the top 20% or so of posters on this website. If that were all it took, you would see people like McGuire getting promotions more often. There is a difference between being knowledgeable-having a well-thought out opinion, being able to defend said opinion and to dumb it down for a TV audience, and having
the correct opinion. I'm sure McGuire could have convinced me why Dustin Tokarski was a future star goaltender in 2008, but that doesn't mean he was right-and if he had selected him then, he would be wrong.
As it is, right now McGuire would have to start as an assistant to someone if he wanted to get into a Head Coach or GM gig-and while I think he has lost much of his former arrogance, I can't see him leaving his NBC job to play second fiddle for someone, all in the hope of someday replacing them.