The story of the day is that MLSE wants to hire John Chayka and also Mats Sundin in a yet to be fully defined structure.
Let's play a game. If the Maple Leafs, not the collection of current players, but their brand or vibes or image – however you want to describe it – if the team was an NHL player, what would they be like?
Cap hit three million higher than anyone likes, too much term, a full NMC, skilled, but you always wonder when he's going to disappear for five games, terrible in the playoffs, likes the cheers when he scores, but doesn't want to hear about it when he's bad. Is never sorry the season is over, and always thinks there's next year. Spends all his money on the best gear, but shows up at training camp in late-January malaise form. Blows off the third period if it's hard, there's always the next game.
Yes, indeed, that is exactly the fanfic that people have written about Auston Matthews, William Nylander, and particularly Mitch Marner. But fanfic doesn't just arise out of the neurosis and biases of the author. It's a vibes kind of narrative that feeds off of wider held opinion about it's source. That is the Leafs vibe, a trust fund kid with no initiative or direction.
We know the Leafs actually do spend money like they have an endless supply. When Brendan Shanahan remade the team and hired the then most expensive coach in NHL history in Mike Babcock, I used to joke they had a money-printing machine in the basement and what came out looked remarkably like a Rogers bill.
In those early days of the modern version of the team, they had a rapidly expanding org chart that culminated in Kyle Dubas's final year where he had someone at the executive level for more possible roles than the average person would be able to imagine. They have six AGMs, which I know because Keith Pelley made a point of pointing that out. Pointedly.
And yet there is a second throughline of passivity, of choosing to not go for it. Shanahan wouldn't commit to Kyle Dubas, and exiled him to the AHL while he cycled through "old school" on legs, Lou Lamoriello and "work ethic" on legs Mark Hunter. They've both been successful in the past – Hunter more so, and yet their teams have had comprehensible identities. Sorry, there is no other word. The London Knights, who many people really hate, are the same team all the time – better than they should be, skilled and also tough, well coached with professional hockey systems (hardly a given in the OHL) and built by scouting. Lamoriello's teams were always "logo on the front not name on the back", orchestra, not soloist, boring, hidebound and lacking in forward power.
This season, the refrain started up on social media – not from takists, random angry fans or attention farmers, but from the better class of reporters and analysts – Who are the Leafs? A better question would have been who have they been all this past decade?
Pelley, in his discussions of culture, was telegraphing that he doesn't like who they are. The question asked of him about why he thought he had the right leadership left behind when he fired Shanahan was pretty on point, and his answer wasn't fulsome. It always pays to listen to what people say, but watch closely what they do.
What he did was call up Mats Sundin and talk to him. Does that character (assassination) sketch up there describe Mats Sundin? Rather the opposite.
So when Elliotte Friedman ran into Sundin and Pelley having a conversation back in March, I bet he wasn't all that surprised. When it became widely known that Sundin was discussing a role on the team, there was a strange reaction. Understandable if you have been seeing that identity I sketched out as embodied only in the players. If your paradigm of the organization is that the players are to blame and don't care and are just counting money and every other thing said about Mitch Marner, then maybe all the Sundin talk does is make you roll your eyes about a famous player being given a job he has no qualifications for.
When names galore were coming out about who the Leafs might interview, Chris Pronger was in there. I said I did not consider him a serious candidate which was understating the case dramatically. I actually found it insulting to a group of people who have decades of NHL managerial experience – including some already employed by the Leafs – to parachute in a guy who acts like an Instagram influencer.
Sundin is different. He has a deep and deeply meaningful connection to the team, and he can challenge that team identity just by standing in the room is a very expensive suit. However, he has zero credentials as a manager. Pelley said he was open to any structure, and it appears he really meant that.
There is no indication that Pelley's lost his reason and wants Sundin to be the overall boss of the hockey operations, the job he said he was hiring for. There's every indication that Sundin himself might be less than inclined to too much self belief.
I got in trouble once for saying that Sundin's entire Leafs career was wasted by the team. People who were fans then – and I was not – loved him and believed in him and raised up the surrounding cast to heights in their imaginations they never achieved because they weren't cut out to achieve them. Sundin knows what never happened when he played for the team. He likely has some pretty good ideas of why.
According to the expanded discussion on this potential outcome from Friedman today on 32 Thoughts, Sundin would not be the top guy, and he has been hesitant about the scope of the role that MLSE is offering him, but that it is not a kind of PR role or what Shane Doan was doing. It's something more, but how much more is vague.
I cynically called it making the team bilingual in hockey guy and nerd talk as a VP to Chayka's President – Friedman's speculative idea about the organizational structure. I think it's more than that, though.
What Pelley said is he wants evidence based decisions and datacentric focus. And as I mentioned in discussing Scott White, Pelley gushed a bit about Eric Tulsky, but also made a rather strongly stated point about the "hockey men" around him. He also talked extensively about culture.
Let's begin by believing Pelley meant what he said. What he said was the culture was a problem. Things happened in hockey operations that Friedman's own reporting has as not how a business would be run. Things happened on the team this year and years past that we all might say are not how a winning team behaves. Things have been said and done that wouldn't be done by a team that understands the ways of thinking that are datacentric and analytical.
The exaggerated and polarized view of hockey man and nerd, numbers and eye-test, gut feelings and analysis, learned expertise and observational evidence might answer the question of who the Leafs are in a slightly different way – a wealthy team, overly sure of the value of what their money bought them, who vacillates between paradigms of management, team construction, coaching systems and player development with no clear strategy.
They have to stop flip-flopping and figure out how to synthesize all of this into one package. You know, like how you expect a top centre to be strong emotionally and physically, constantly engaged, good with and without the puck, stoic and also aggressive, the quintessential 200ft player who will play in January how he plays in June (or at least credibly look like it).
The idea or ideal of Mats Sundin as a necessary aspect of the modern Leafs 2.0 is a rational choice from Pelley. So is Chayka or Smith or Evan Gold or Mike Gillis. So is the retention of some of the people already there. I'm not qualified to judge them.
There is another person who has the drive, the determination, the commitment to the game and also the glorious rewards, and that is Haley Wickenheiser. Please put aside your "women are better people" takes for a second and consider her for her merit as an individual person. She is absolutely the embodiment of the ideals the Leafs lack. And there were early rumours about her as the speaker of hockeyese in this new structure.
Hockey, like every sport, goes too far in it's affection for the affect of the star player. You can't role model your way to a Cup. Although I actually wouldn't count out Patrice Bergeron as capable of putting the lie to that. Mats Sundin never could pick up the team and carry it on his back to glory on the ice, and he can't do that now. But the Maple Leafs can't be just another Bay Street office where you go to put in your time while you accumulate stock options.
When I discussed hockey team structure in general terms I ended with this:
You have to believe in something. Even if you're Rogers, you have to believe in more than just oligopolies and share prices. If you're the Leafs, you have to believe in more than "gosh we're rich." If you're the coach, you have to have more than an aphorism about work ethic.
The lesson of Treliving's tenure is that what you believe in has to be grounded in the reality of your people and what they can do and what that can accomplish. Not what you'd like them to be. Identity and culture cannot be imposed top-down and they aren't substitutes for what works.
You can't impose culture by talking about it. Or by signing Ryan Reaves. Or by trying to invoke the ghost of Domi past. Or, for that matter, Domi's best friend Mats Sundin. I think what I missed in that conclusion was that you do have to embody it in individuals. The ideal has to be made manifest right there in human form.
That's why I think bronze isn't enough, and the Leafs would be better with Sundin. No matter who else they hire.
