TORONTO — Finally, something different. A fresh message. Actual urgency.
There was an unfamiliar feeling in the room at the Toronto Maple Leafs practice facility for Friday’s end-of-season media availability, and it had everything to do with the new man sitting at the table.
Keith Pelley, hired away from golf’s European Tour to run Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment earlier this year, made it clear that the status quo is no more for a team that has chronically underperformed when the stakes are highest.
“We’re not here to sell jerseys,” he said. “We’re here to win.”
Pelley is not even six weeks into a job he officially started on April 2. That gave him enough time to get a first-hand look at the Leafs throughout their seven-game series loss to the Boston Bruins but left an extremely limited window for evaluating how everything is functioning at the top levels of the hockey operations department.
As much as he seemed encouraged by his early observations of how president Brendan Shanahan and general manager Brad Treliving worked together, the period of review clearly remains open.
Shanahan, in particular, appears to be on shaky footing after 10 years in the president’s chair. He is entering what the organization announced in May 2019 would be the final year of his contract and only has one playoff series victory to show for his efforts.
(Asked to clarify his contractual status on Friday, Shanahan declined.)
In years past, when the Shanaplan was still in effect, there was never anything remotely close to the level of urgency we saw and heard here Friday. The only rush after playoff losses to the Columbus Blue Jackets (2020), Montreal Canadiens (2021) and Tampa Bay Lightning (2022) was to defend the organization’s decision to commit half of its available cap space to four forwards and to quell any discussion about potentially veering from that strategy.
With a new boss sitting to his right following the Leafs’ eighth series loss in nine tries during his tenure, Shanahan finally acknowledged that his patience had run out on that strategy.
“If you were to just live in a vacuum and just view this one playoff, you may have a different view of our team and the optimism and the closeness of where they were, but we can’t think that way now after seeing what we’ve seen year after year after year,” Shanahan said — at least a year or two too late.
This realization has dawned at a time when the team’s five-highest paid players all have contracts that include no-movement clauses. Trading Mitch Marner and/or captain John Tavares, both local products with deep ties here and monster cap hits, won’t be easy as they enter free-agent seasons.
But the possibility is for the first time truly on the table in the Leafs front office.
Pelley is known as a change agent who has previously been in charge of television networks, a professional football team and for nine years the European golf tour. He brings a global perspective to the role — likening the passion he saw from fans in Maple Leafs Square during Game 6 against the Bruins to the feeling he had when he first visited Anfield in Liverpool and heard fans sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
One of his last acts in his previous job was being part of Europe’s Ryder Cup victory outside Rome last fall.
“We came in as underdogs, but the bottom line is under the guidance of (captain) Luke Donald, we had chemistry and unity that exceeded that of the Americans and as a result, we were very successful,” Pelley said. “Skill, chemistry and unity is what I believe the recipe for success is and for me, success is winning the Stanley Cup. Nothing else matters than winning the Stanley Cup.”
After stepping into a role that carries a “heavy responsibility,” Pelley intends to see the Leafs become an organization known for those attributes.
He’s not one to sit back and wait for his vision to manifest, either.
The winds of change are already blowing strongly after a series of organizational meetings were held this week following the Game 7 overtime loss in Boston last Saturday night.
Consider that there’s now a new reporting structure with Pelley sandwiched between Shanahan and the Leafs’ board of directors. Treliving still represents new blood in management with his first anniversary in Toronto coming May 31. There will, of course, also be a new head coach behind the bench in the fall after Sheldon Keefe was fired on Thursday morning.
Some significant roster changes seem to be in the offing, too.
“We’ve got really good players, but it hasn’t worked,” Treliving said.
You could probably win a bar bet with your buddies if you asked them to name the last time before Friday that Shanahan sat behind a microphone to discuss the status of the Maple Leafs and wasn’t the highest-ranking person at the table.
The answer: April 14, 2014, when he was formally introduced as team president inside the atrium at Scotiabank Arena alongside Tim Leiweke, who had just hired him away from a job at the NHL’s front office.
Leiweke left the organization three months later, and Shanahan hasn’t reported to a CEO actively involved in team operations again until now.
Pelley has little interest in looking backward, but he’s unmistakably raised the internal bar on what is expected moving forward.
“Good is simply not good enough,” he said. “I can assure you that is the collective position of ownership. When I asked during the interview stage (how they’ll define success), one of them immediately said emphatically ‘Just win.’”
(Photo of Keith Pelley and Brendan Shanahan: Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press via The Associated Press)
Christine Lake is a sports fanatic who lives and breathes athletics. With an extensive background in sports journalism, he covers everything from major league championships to grassroots sports events. When she’s not on the field or at the stadium, you’ll find Christine coaching youth sports teams.
