written in collaboration with Alec Brownscombe
It has been a long time since the Toronto Maple Leafs were this bad. In case you’d somehow forgotten – or haven’t followed the team for more than a decade – the vultures are always ready to strike when the Maple Leafs appear moribund.
Case in point, a story about the price the organization charges parents for their kid to wave a Leafs flag at center ice before the game “broke” roughly four months after the Leafs launched this “perk” in December. Shortly after the team made it available, they went on a hot streak, winning eight of 10 games and momentarily returning to a playoff position.
I suppose the story doesn’t quite hit the same when the team is competitive. When the on-ice results are this bad, though, it is like gasoline on an open flame.
This is not to excuse the Leafs whoring for every last cent. It’s deplorable behaviour from a franchise that’s gone six decades without meaningfully rewarding its fans, and I don’t respect it in any capacity. At times, the franchise clearly needs to prioritize its brand management and connection with its fans over the almighty dollar. But the timing of the story and its reception serve as a stark reminder of the noise that swells around this team when the results go south.
The theme continued this week when The Athletic dropped a bit of a bombshell piece titled, “Inside the stunning fall of the Maple Leafs: Chaos, dysfunction and AI.” While we’re not in the habit of combing or line-by-line over articles we can all read for ourselves, the story generated an explosive response and sent enough shockwaves through the hockey world to warrant some thoughts.
To be clear, much of the reporting appears sound, and much of the resulting outrage is well-founded. We already knew that Keith Pelley attended the Leafs trade deadline in person because he told us as much. He described himself as a silent observer, but as Alec wrote at the time, if you took him at his word, we have a bridge to sell to you.
Just from listening to Pelley speak publicly since taking over as President and CEO of MLSE, it was clear there was little chance he sat there quietly observing all day long. The details The Athletic reported went a step further:
“He peppered the team’s scouts with questions, demanded more “assets” in trade conversations, and tossed out opinions and ideas… Pelley didn’t come empty-handed either. He had notes that included possible trade returns that Leafs staff members believed were generated by Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence.”
As Pelley himself has said several times, he’s not a scout or a GM, and he won’t tell anyone who is playing left wing, and yet walking into the trade deadline war room armed with notes and actively asking questions is further confirmation of what we already knew: Pelley is currently too involved in hockey operations and is quite possibly micromanaging. No one credible will want to work for him if this continues.
To be fair, his presence in the room was probably stunning even to him, given the context of the dismal on-ice results, and it did lead to the firing of Brad Treliving, which was absolutely necessary. It’s fair to scrutinize how Pelley chose to interject himself, but nobody is complaining about the end result here (so far). The major question is whether the meddling continues once he has his hire in place; one would like to think – or hope – that since Pelley is hiring the next person, he would not feel the need to stand over their shoulder and breathe down their neck.
The other explosive revelation was the potential use of LLMs or AI to sketch out potential trade returns (technically, this wasn’t actually confirmed – it was seemingly framed as merely the suspicion of some staff members in the room, and Pelley has since denied using AI to influence the deadline. The potential application of AI, if it were used, is also vague/unknown).
If we work off the assumption that the report is accurate, it should be noted that, of course, AI models, trained on quality data and with the right prompts, can be a useful tool for something like assembling a handy list of relevant comparables among past trades, which can provide the background data/research that might be useful to a GM actively pursuing fair returns in the market. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily an unreasonable or reckless use of AI. The involvement in hockey ops from the person potentially providing this information (Humza Teherany) and the person potentially presenting it (Pelley) is the highly questionable part.
This is compounded by the fact that the Leafs already employ an AGM of Hockey Research & Development, who has six members on his team. Was this group not already collecting this data and preparing these types of reports for the GM? Why the need to generate them elsewhere, if so? If the story is true, it could be a real indictment of a rather robust hockey research team.
As questions abound about Pelley’s involvement in the trade deadline and overall hockey operations, so too have the cost-cutting measures Rogers has been implementing, highlighted by a 10% cut in their workforce, the decision not to replace Brendan Shanahan in the POHO role, and the removal of the Sports Science Department’s Rich Rotenberg.
After the article dropped, Chris Johnston expanded on TSN: “Do the Leafs still spend more than any other team, as Keith Pelley has pointed out? That is a fair thing, and I do believe that to be the case.” This critical context is conspicuously absent from the article itself, though. To generally frame the cost-cutting as part of the Leafs’ downfall, despite recognizing – but not mentioning – that they spend more than any other NHL organization is not exactly even-handed work.
Are some of these cuts petty in nature? Yes, absolutely. Others might shade toward more reasonable than meets the eye. In November, the team cancelled the dad’s trip in favour of the rookie dinner. Frankly, strictly viewing it from a hockey perspective, I would have kept the trip when it was, knowing the team was struggling at the time; the dads might have been a welcome shot in the arm (don’t kid yourself – having the dads in the stands has an impact on the players). But prioritizing the team and the rookie dinner has some merit, too.
Other items, like making the Marlies take the bus more often, are actually debated in hockey circles all the time: Do you really want players to be too comfortable in the minors? (If you don’t like taking the bus, fight your way to the NHL!). Some will suggest this is silly, old-school thinking, but you can’t turn around and criticize an entitlement culture within the organization when AHLers are flown around to nearby games, either. It’s also not like there is any correlation with success here, one way or the other.
Other cuts mentioned were unnecessary but didn’t meaningfully impact the hockey bottom line. I don’t think anyone genuinely believes the season went off the rails in part because the players’ Real Sports discounts were slashed from 50 percent to 30 percent.
The big question here is whether this cost-cutting marks the start of a trend toward more meaningful budget reductions that could negatively impact the team’s personnel on and off the ice. But nothing that’s been presented as evidence so far suggests that we should dissuade ourselves of the previously widely held notion that the Leafs’ resources and facilities are top-of-the-line. The Leafs recently signed a collection of college free agents who immediately raved about their treatment in the minors. The overall resources and facilities available to players still dwarf those of pretty much every other team in the league, as every new player who arrives in Toronto is almost always quick to point out. The organization has earned much of the criticism it has received this season, but for anyone to react to these reports with the impression that the Leafs are verging on a Melnyk’s Sens-style poverty franchise, or even that the specific cuts cited tie into the Leafs’ disappointing season on the ice, requires major leaps in logic.
Again, Rotenberg’s dismissal was reiterated, given all the Leafs’ injuries this season. It should be noted that the Leafs have ranked among the league leaders in injuries over the past few seasons, and just about every playoff run has been a mess when it comes to the handling of injuries. It’s not like the Leafs suddenly succumbed to the injury bug out of nowhere.
Further, it’s worth revisiting what Brad Treliving said about the sports science department at the time of the initial reporting:
“There was a gentleman, Rich Rotenberg, who was with the organization, left the organization, and moved to Pittsburgh. He is a good man who did a good job, but his duties were in a coordinating position. We promoted somebody into that position to coordinate and oversee the daily job description and the daily duties of our medical staff.
Quite frankly, we have added more staff this year than we had last year.”
This information is not difficult to verify. The Leafs post their staff listings online. Last season, they employed 10 people on their performance staff, and this season – without Rich – it was 11. They did employ one fewer assistant athletic therapist on their medical staff, but they also added a mental health consultant and a mental performance consultant, perhaps as a response to Treliving and Berube’s insistence that the team’s playoff collapse against the Panthers was mental more than anything else.
The article then outlined the general dysfunction between Berube and Treliving, and there is a lot of indisputable validity to this – from Berube addressing the team right before they soiled themselves against Boston, to Treliving’s inability to get any trades over the hump, to Treliving and Berube publicly presenting different messages at times (be it who was running the power play or whether they were sitting players ahead of the trade deadline), there were clear signs of incompetence and a disconnect up and down the chain of command – from the GM, to the coach, to the player group. If there wasn’t a philosophical difference between Treliving and Berube, there were certainly some issues in the lines of communication that left them appearing to be on separate pages. The results speak for themselves, and both individuals deserve heavy criticism/the loss of their jobs.
Also worth noting is the sentence, “The Athletic spoke to more than 20 sources inside the organization and around the league.” The phrase “around the league” is obviously vague, and how much anyone outside the team can credibly speak on the article’s underlying premise — the dysfunction within the organization — is up to the reader to decide. Maybe it’s an agent for a player on the team, or maybe it’s someone else employed by some other team around the league.
But the internal employees speaking anonymously? MLSE should spend some real time finding out who exactly spoke up, and those people should be immediately removed from the organization.
In Chris Johnston’s radio appearance, he mentioned that long-time employees are uncertain about their jobs going forward amid the turmoil. It’s an understandable feeling, and nobody wants to lose their job. But if the instinct from that point is to blab to the media on the condition of anonymity, this is not an employee the organization should want working for it. That’s without mentioning the mess of a season that just transpired, which means many of them really should be on notice for justifiable reasons.
Some are likely counting down the days and are eager to paint a picture that shifts the blame elsewhere. Some already likely know they’re on the way out and are getting ahead of it. It’s important to be mindful of personal agendas, which will include some fact and some fiction. Either way, anyone tied to the organization who engages in media gossip must go immediately. The franchise has to stop the bleeding here, especially in a market like Toronto.
There is always a media racket when things go south in Leafland. Part of the challenge for the next head of hockey operations is separating the white noise from the real issues in need of addressing.
A final note on Matthews
This article addressed the “stunning fall” of an organization that went from a division title and seven playoff wins last season to a bottom-five position in the NHL standings this year, with a clear theme of questionable leadership and cultural issues throughout. Not once was the performance, production, and leadership of the captain of the hockey team and face of the franchise mentioned, who also happened to be the league’s second-highest-paid player this season. He produced at a 72-point pace — that would’ve barely broken the top 50 in NHL scoring — and too rarely looked like the best player on the ice in games. It’s a little bizarre, in a post-mortem article about the Leafs’ disappointing season, to write more about 20% reductions in Real Sports discounts than a 100-point player/captain turning into a 70-point one, to say nothing about Matthews’ responsibility for leading the team’s culture and upholding standards in the room and on the ice. Maybe it’s not as sexy as all the AI talk and the irritating examples of corporate greed, but it certainly has much more bearing on the results we saw on the ice this season. It just isn’t providing the full picture if we portray Matthews as merely a victim of the circumstances as opposed to an actively disappointing piece of the team’s underwhelming results. He must be better as a captain and player going forward: more production, more dominant shifts at key times, more genuine expressions of real accountability for his own play, and more willingness to step in for his teammates, just like he deserved in the immediate aftermath of the Radko Gudas hit. Matthews fully deserves a chance to rebound under a proper coach and manager, but he also has to take responsibility for his own role in the season’s failure and come back much better/with a point to prove in the Fall.
