When Mathieu Darche was hired as general manager of the New York Islanders on May 23, he inherited a firestorm of tasks - from the NHL Combine to the draft, free agency, and arbitration cases — all within weeks. Yet despite the chaos, Darche insists he never felt overwhelmed.
The reason, he says, comes back to his six years spent working alongside Julien BriseBois in Tampa Bay. “Learning from Julien all those years, I felt prepared,” Darche told Pierre LeBrun in The Athletic. “Was it a lot? Yes. But I enjoyed the grind of it.