The AHL team was Chris MacFarland’s baby. Late one season, holding a sizable lead in the standings as the playoffs neared, he kept marching into work laser-focused, as though the general manager was lacing up skates to play.
“He’d come in and be like, ‘Big game tonight. We gotta have this one,'” then-colleague Josh Flynn said.
Flynn was dumbfounded by it.
“I think we’re getting in…” he would tell MacFarland. “He says, ‘Oh no, this can happen and this can happen. We’ve gotta focus.’”
MacFarland doesn’t let games or seasons go easily. He has a near-encyclopedic memory of players he has evaluated and teams he has administered throughout his career, from the 2007-08 Syracuse Crunch to the Colorado Avalanche’s historic nadir in 2016-17.