Good riddance?
I am not going to pretend that I know what he was doing, but most people seem to hate him and I am not a big fan of fairly recently retired players in high management positions, so I guess I am happy he is gone.
Who's next in line here now?
I go back to what I have said before.
While you can not know 100 percent for sure if the thoughts regarding Billy G. are fair or unfair, you can read between the lines of what we do know and make some reasonable educated guesses.
What things do we know?
1. JR came over as one of the early adopters of going all in on analytics and brought his analytics team led by Karmanos with him.
2, The commitment to analytics have only grown with the hiring of Sam Ventura who co-founded the hockey analytics website war-on-ice.com.
3. The Penguins the last couple of years especially have been a team at war with itself in competing incompatable visions for the team. It is beyond obvious that there have been a segment who has gone all in for four lines of speed, youth and possession, and a faction that wants that old time hockey size and grit. So we had this weird hybrid that did not work for either vision or team direction. It also caused pretty much all of the bad trades the last couple of years, trades that everyone knew were boners from the moment that they were made.
So you add 1+2+3 and you have to ask who in the FO is most likely to be the size queen. Add that Billy G looks like he has been hit in the head once too often and it is a fairly good educated guess who has been to blame for being at war with the team identity that won back to back cups.