MLSE president and CEO Keith Pelley's search for a data-centric Leafs GM continues with the help of Neil Glasberg, president of The Coaches Agency.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
The Viterbo conclave was the one where it took them three years to pick a pope. Eventually, the enraged villagers of Viterbo – who’d been paying their room and board – started ripping the roof off the palace the cardinals were in, exposing them to the elements.
That sounds less complicated than whatever the Maple Leafs are doing right now.
It is one thing to fire your general manager with a month left in the season. It is another to do so with no idea what comes next. It is yet another to turn what should be a pretty simple job for a hockey team into a Tolkien-esque quest.
Every serious business devotes attention to the idea of succession. Not the Leafs. They don’t need to make plans because things are always going to work out this time.
The club was so ill-prepared for next steps that before hiring someone, they had to hire someone else to tell them who to hire. What does everybody at MLSE do all day? Are they all too busy wrapping hundreds in rubber bands to fit in any sports?
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Earlier this week, everybody knew that the Leafs had tapped a coaches’ agent named Neil Glasberg to steer their search. Asking a hockey agent who to hire is like asking someone at the Apple Store if you should buy a Samsung. He’s only going to have one kind of answer.
MLSE tried this before, with the soccer club. In between coaching Bayern Munich and the U.S. national team, they gave Jürgen Klinsmann a packet of dough to tell them which coach to hire for Toronto FC.
Agent Neil Glasberg, seen at the Hockey Hall of Fame's 2018 induction ceremony, is working with MLSE as it continues its search for its next GM.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
Klinsmann picked Aron Winter, who was a disaster. His authoritarian style extended to banning the wearing of flip flops unless accompanied by socks. Winter turned an already bad club feral and, once he was fired, never got a serious coaching job again.
You’d think someone would file a note somewhere – ‘Maybe don’t do that again.’ But here we are.
That the biggest hockey team in the world can’t handle its own hockey business is bad enough, but on Thursday it reached comical levels. The Leafs put out a press release asking people to please stop making inquiries about their top-secret mission. Which is to say, they put out a press release announcing their top-secret mission.
“The organization’s top priority is to respect the integrity of the process,” the unsigned note said in part.
How does any of this work, I wonder? Is it a bunch of people sitting around a table, looking serious because their priority is respecting the process? Not doing it, mind you. They’re not qualified for that sort of thing. They don’t do processes. They just respect them.
Then Glasberg bursts into the room – “After searching high and low in my own office, I found him. The perfect man for you. Likes long walks while holding hands with the team owner and jogging away from the press. So where do I pick up my cheque? The one from you, I mean. I’ll get the one from him later.”
I love the job I have, but if the city needs me, I will make myself available to the Leafs for a shockingly large fee. I’ve got some names already – all outside-the-box picks (i.e. friends) and people who know how to return a favour. I’ll even thrown in a guarantee: If the Leafs don’t win the Cup inside five years, I’ll pick someone better.
Running the Leafs is a bit like being prime minister. Wanting the job should disqualify you from it. Only someone who is a self-promoter first or sharp as a bowling ball can believe they will do what no one has been able to do in generations.
And only an extreme example of that type could get a look at what the Leafs have set up for his arrival – a demoralized roster with no room or appetite for change, along with expectations of immediate success – and think, “Where do I sign?”
In the Leafs’ defence, they are an entertainment-forward outfit. If the hockey team isn’t capable of providing it, then management will. You’ll notice that an organization that was once good at keeping a secret no longer is. Only the biggest clubs understand that people need things to talk about to keep them interested. Better bad news than no news.
If head coach Craig Berube makes it through the summer and returns next season, Cathal Kelly writes, he could be a human shield for the Leafs' hire to replace GM Brad Treliving.Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
You will know that we have fully turned into the Leafs’ next ‘Bronx is Burning’ era if head coach Craig Berube survives the summer.
Like so many Leafs undertakings, Berube looked like he should have worked out, but didn’t. If he’s retained, that means the next person in charge is already thinking in terms of human shields. The longer he waits to fire someone, the more time he put on his own clock. If that’s what the next regime is about, then this is about to get really fun.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter who the Leafs hire. The problem of NHL hockey in Toronto is more fundamental than this person making that move for those people. The organization is rotten through. It either attracts the wrong types of players or turns them wrong. They’d be better off hiring a psychiatrist than a hockey executive.
None of that matters because Toronto always forgives, and Toronto always kicks up its share. The Leafs won’t change because the market is screaming at them to keep doing things exactly as they always have – chaotically, and never to completion. As long as people keep buying, radical reform isn’t just unlikely. It would be fiscally irresponsible.
In Viterbo, after they’d torn off the roof, the townspeople took pity on the cardinals. After a few weeks, they allowed them to move to covered rooms again. Then the cardinals took advantage of their hospitality for another year. It’s an old con, but it still works.