Seven years ago, the Detroit Red Wings pulled off the near-impossible: They made a move that absolutely everyone loved.Their own fans, who were thrilled. Other fan bases, who were grudgingly jealous. The media. The experts. The insiders. The nerds. All 200 hockey men.Everyone agreed: Hiring Steve Yzerman as general manager was a slam dunk.The news landed one Friday morning, somehow both coming out of nowhere while also feeling like we’d known it all along. Of course the captain was coming home. After an apprenticeship in Tampa Bay that saw him build the Lightning into a powerhouse, Yzerman was returning to Detroit to do the same for the team he’d led to three Stanley Cup titles on the ice. The news received glowing reviews everywhere, with the possible exception of Tampa Bay, where a team already reeling from a historic playoff collapse in their first year without Yzerman worried about what might come next.Is Zach Werenski really committed to the Blue Jackets?Aaron Portzline and Sean McIndoeAfter all, this wasn’t just the typical NHL homecoming, where a struggling team trots out a former player to buy some time with a skeptical public. In 2019, Yzerman was considered one of the very best GMs in the league. He’d worked magic in Tampa, he’d led Team Canada to gold, he’d won GM of the Year. Now he was home, taking over a team ready to make the next step toward contention and beyond.It was a new hope because it couldn’t fail. And then it did.There’s really no arguing it. We can quibble over which adverbs to apply — did he fail spectacularly or just dramatically? — but the failure part isn’t up for debate. And among the many pieces of the fallout we’re still sorting through sits Yzerman’s reputation as a front-office genius, once pristine, now in shambles.If you’ve been a hockey fan long enough, all of this might sound oddly familiar.Stop me if you’ve heard it before. A GM establishes himself with one team, building a reputation that morphs from competent to smart to borderline infallible. They win plenty, maybe even a championship or two. Eventually they hit the open market, where other teams line up to meet them with open arms and blank checks. When one finally hires them, we all but get to work on the Cup engraving.And then it just doesn’t work. And we’re all left wondering: Wait, was that guy really as smart as we all thought?It happens time and again. Here are a half-dozen of the most notable.Glen SatherMaybe the most famous example of all, Glen Sather won five Cup titles in Edmonton, including one nobody saw coming after he’d been forced to sell off Wayne Gretzky. And even as the sport’s emerging economics hammered the small-market Oilers into submission, Sather kept them competitive. At one point, while lamenting the financial constraints he was working under, Sather infamously said, “If I had the Rangers payroll, I’d never lose a game.”Then the Rangers hired him in 2000, and he got his wish, including several years of pre-cap freedom where he could basically throw unlimited money at any player he wanted. The result: A massive payroll, a bunch of broken-down former stars clogging up the roster and zero playoff appearances. Sather eventually found some success in his later years in New York, but never won another Cup title.Ken HollandA familiar name for Wings fans, Ken Holland was GM in Detroit for over 20 years before Yzerman arrived, winning three Cup titles as GM and another as an assistant. In 2009, Sports Illustrated’s list of the top 10 executives of the decade had Holland in second place across all of pro sports, trailing only the New England Patriots’ Scott Pioli and ahead of names such as Theo Epstein and Billy Beane; they wrote that he “assiduously has kept this well-oiled machine purring with artful final-pieces-of-the-puzzle deals and signings.”When he became available in 2019, the Oilers snapped him up almost immediately in what seemed like a perfect fit. Five extremely uneven years later, he was out, with his reputation so diminished that the Kings hiring him was met with headlines such as this.Peter ChiarelliAfter winning the Cup in Boston, Peter Chiarelli was riding so high that the Bruins proudly posted his trade deliberations online. He was hired in Edmonton in 2015 in the aftermath of the Connor McDavid lottery win, heralded as the culture change the team needed. These days his four-year stint is remembered for “the trade is one for one” and not much else, and he hasn’t held a GM job since.By the way, that’s two Oilers GMs, and we didn’t even mention Stan Bowman. If you have any doubts about the danger of can’t-miss GMs with one successful stint on their resumes, ask an Edmonton fan.