Peter Chiarelli

Peter Chiarelli (born August 5, 1964) is a Canadian ice hockey executive and former player.

He is the Vice President of Hockey Operations for the St. Louis Blues of the National Hockey League.

Chiarelli played for Harvard University between 1983 and 1987, serving as the captain of the team.

During his freshman year there, he lived in Straus Hall, where Seth Goldman was one of his roommates.

Professionally he played for the Nottingham Panthers of the British Hockey League (BHL).

Prior to becoming an NHL executive, Chiarelli was a player agent before joining the Ottawa Senators in 1999.

He was also an attorney in private practice in Ottawa having graduated from the University of Ottawa's law school.

Chiarelli served as the assistant general manager for the Ottawa Senators for two years, including the cancelled 2004–05 lockout season.

Chiarelli was hired on May 26, 2006 as the general manager of the Boston Bruins, signed to a four-year contract.

However, due to NHL rules, he was required to wait until July 8 to assume his duties in Boston, instead finishing out his time as an assistant general manager with the Senators.

This precluded him from making decisions for the Bruins at the 2006 NHL Entry Draft, which was handled by interim general manager Jeff Gorton.

Gorton made a number of highly consequential moves that would form the bedrock of Chiarelli's tenure, first trading the Bruins' Calder Memorial Trophy-winning young goaltender Andrew Raycroft to the Toronto Maple Leafs in exchange for Tuuka Rask.

Raycroft would never realize his early potential, while Rask became a Vezina Trophy-winning franchise mainstay for over a decade, and the trade was in retrospect considered a decisive win for the Bruins and one of the worst in Leafs history.

Shortly thereafter he signed Zdeno Chára in free agency, who would remain for fourteen years, all of that time as captain, winning the James Norris Memorial Trophy as the league's best defenceman along the way.

At the draft, Gorton selected Phil Kessel in the first round and Milan Lucic in the second, and traded up to select future core player Brad Marchand in the third.

After Chiarelli assumed his managerial duties, Gorton returned to his role as an assistant, but was dismissed by Chiarelli a year later.

In the following years Chiarelli made consequential additions including Johnny Boychuk, Andrew Ference and Dennis Wideman, the latter later used to acquire Nathan Horton in trade.

On June 19, 2009, Chiarelli received a four-year contract extension through the 2013–14 season.

Afterward, he made Boston's second major trade with the Maple Leafs in this period, after concluding that Bruins star forward Kessel could not be re-signed.

Instead he was traded to the Maple Leafs in exchange for a package that included two unprotected first round draft picks.

Due to the poor performance of the Maple Leafs in subsequent years, both of those were in the top ten, allowing the Bruins to select Tyler Seguin second overall in 2010 and Dougie Hamilton ninth overall in 2011.

This trade, similar to the Raycroft/Rask trade three years prior, was considered one of the Leafs' worst.

He previously served as general manager of both the Boston Bruins and the Edmonton Oilers, winning the Stanley Cup with the Bruins in 2011.

Both of his tenures as general manager ended with his being fired, with his Oilers managerial career in particular a source of controversy.

On June 15, 2011, Chiarelli won the Stanley Cup with the Bruins.

The Bruins would reach the Stanley Cup Finals for a second time under Chiarelli, in 2013, shortly after which he signed another four-year contract extension.

The Bruins won the Presidents' Trophy as the team with the best regular season record for 2013–14.

However, the later years of Chiarelli's tenure were not as successful managerially, and he became increasingly the object of criticism for perceived poor trades and salary cap management decisions.

In particular, it was widely believed that he had not received adequate return for trading Seguin to the Dallas Stars in 2013.

Things came to a head in the 2014–15 season, which began on a sour note when Chiarelli traded Boychuk to the New York Islanders.

This trade was prompted by the Bruins lacking salary cap space, which was in turn blamed on many of the contracts that Chiarelli had opted to sign.

Boychuk's absence from the team's defensive corps would hurt in the season that followed, particularly because of a lengthy injury to Chára.

Struggling with injuries and subpar performances by key players, the Bruins missed the playoffs for the first time in eight years, and on April 15, 2015 Chiarelli was fired.

Reviewing his tenure at the time of his dismissal, Sports Illustrated opined that he had "built a nice legacy" in Boston, but faulted the later years as "marred by trade disasters, misplaced loyalties and salary cap mismanagement."

However, they also suggested that he would soon be hired by another team.

On April 24, 2015, nine days after he was fired by the Bruins, the Edmonton Oilers announced Chiarelli's hiring as general manager and president of hockey operations.

As general manager, his first task was to prepare for the 2015 NHL Entry Draft, where the Oilers held the first overall pick after winning the draft lottery, as well as other high draft picks in what would prove in many assessments to be the deepest draft of the decade.

With the first overall pick, the Oilers selected Connor McDavid, hailed as the most talented prospect since Sidney Crosby a decade earlier.

However, at the same time Chiarelli made another decision that would in retrospect be considered one of his worst, trading the sixteenth and thirty-third overall picks to the New York Islanders for defenceman Griffin Reinhart.

Reinhart would ultimately play only 29 games for the Oilers, considered a draft bust, while the Islanders would use the sixteenth overall pick in the deep draft to select star forward Matthew Barzal.