I think too many people are hung up on the official title of Waddell as GM. While he's going to be the GM of the Canes going forward, he's not going to be the GM in the typical fashion you'd expect with any given franchise. Dundon has repeatedly said that he's looking to have the team governed by committee, which is why you saw him also bring in Dudley, kept Vellucci around in a VP role, and kept Tulsky around. He's setting the team up to run like a legit business and wants to ensure there are redundancies and the ability to continue forward should anyone leave. Part of making this work is splitting out the typical roles of the GM through this braintrust, which has the effect of making the GM role less valuable to the franchise. This is a big reason you are seeing these rumors of lowball salaries for potential GMs, because the role isn't as all encompassing as you'd expect. But offering the reasoning doesn't get as many page clicks as "omg Canes owner is a cheapass look at this circus lolz". I would expect that baked into this, you'll see the salaries of the guys surrounding Waddell to have risen a bit to justify the extra responsibilities they have, though I haven't seen anything officially stated, yet.
Do we know that this will work? No, absolutely not. This could absolutely blow up in our face and then we're left with a team that routinely misses the playoffs and a half-filled home arena that only gets rowdy when bandwagon teams roll into town. But it could also work, and it could also revolutionize the sport as we know it. 10 years from now, the Canes could be one of the stronger teams in the league with other flailing franchises falling over themselves to copy our managerial model. We don't know how this is going to go, and to state anything has hard fact one way or another is completely and utterly foolish. The same kind of foolish that knew that Vegas was setting themselves up for a tank this year, and knew that Doug Pederson was the most unqualified NFL head coaching hire in 3+ decades 2 years ago, and knew that Jim Rutherford was going to fail in Pittsburgh because of how bad he allowed things to get in Raleigh, and knew that the Philadelphia 76ers "process" would never lead to a team capable of the playoffs. But I get it, much easier to offer the hot take now and hope nobody brings receipts when you're proven wrong later.
