When MLSE boss
Keith Pelley made it clear he will not be bringing in a new president of hockey operations to replace
Brendan Shanahan, it revealed a simple new philosophy within the
Maple Leafs organization: Less is more.
The Leafs have had one of the largest hockey operations departments in the NHL over the last 10 years and it’s not hard to figure out how it got so bloated. Decades of frustration led to the appointment of Shanahan as president, and he was tasked with trying to find outside-the-box solutions. So, in 2014, a young and idealistic CHL executive named
Kyle Dubas came along.
Shanahan’s interest in hiring Dubas was based on his willingness to be bold and challenge traditional hockey norms with new ideas. Dubas instantly pushed his new boss to build a team with innovative methods.
When you are one of the most financially successful sports franchises on the planet, you look for any competitive edge you can get. And if you can’t spend your unlimited funds on players because of a salary cap, you simply spend it on resources around them. Shanahan and Dubas built a massive — and very expensive — support team around the Leafs.
Dubas spent on staff as if it were Monopoly money. Entire research and development teams were created behind his vision of moving away from traditional hockey men and instead enlisting chemical engineers and mathematicians to shape the future of the franchise.
He was fascinated by sophisticated cameras for tracking data with unprecedented video angles. He hired the organization’s first director of sports science and performance in 2017, a department that convinced management they could use data to predict injuries before they actually happened. Nutrition, rehab, strength and conditioning, team psychologists, chefs and sleep hygiene experts became the engine intended to drive player performance.
While it seems great in theory, it appeared to weaken the instinctual element that is imperative for a winning team. There were just too many opinions the players had to manage and it took away from the raw instincts of what is truly needed for a hockey club to come together.
The Core Four is a perfect example of how the team created a group of elite individual hockey players that just were not great together. All the science in the world couldn’t help them find the right chemistry to get past the Florida Panthers, who might have half the opinions that the Leafs have on staff.
All the forward thinking was the Leafs’ attempt at looking, sounding and feeling different than any other NHL team in history. No stone was left unturned in their quest to buy a Stanley Cup championship with performance enhancement.
