MLSE president and CEO Keith Pelley said during Tuesday’s press conference that he’s seeking a data-driven executive to take the place of the freshly-fired Brad Treliving.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Since arriving from the European golf tour a couple of years ago, MLSE CEO Keith Pelley has played a type. He’s the media guy who loves sports, but is smart enough to know he doesn’t know sports. He’s all wide-eyed and just here to listen.
“I will not make a habit of coming to end-of-the-year press conference …” Pelley said to kick off Toronto FC’s end-of-the-year press conference in 2024.
“I will not make this a habit of participating in team operations news conferences …” he said to begin the Leafs post-mortem that same year.
On Monday, after he’d once again clipped the top guy on the team’s org chart, Pelley was no longer apologizing for horning in on Leafs business. He doesn’t have a choice. He’s the last man standing.
Freed of the presence of a sports figure at his side, you got a sense of how Pelley talks in front of a room of rich people who also love sports, but don’t kid themselves that they know anything about it.
There were train metaphors and a bunch of MBA speak about alignment, structure and culture. GM Brad Treliving was praised as a great guy and, by implication, a terrible manager. Head coach Craig Berube keeps his job, but were I him, I wouldn’t be buying new furniture.
There are various levels of the kiss of death. On Monday, Pelley delivered one with a lot of tongue. If you work anywhere in the Leafs organization right now, it’s time to start looking into what sort of penalties you’re looking at to break a lease.
I wouldn’t give you whatever’s in my wallet right now for a Leafs’ season ticket, but after watching this kabuki performance, I would pay real money to attend a MLSE board meeting. Here’s the sense, in Pelley’s answer to a question about the Leafs’ “alignment”:
“We didn’t have alignment through all aspects of our business. If you look at each team, each team has certain verticals, and the verticals weren’t horizontally integrated as they need to be.”
I have never felt so naked without a protractor.
Almost two years ago, Pelley, left, was flanked by president Brendan Shanahan, centre, and GM Brad Treliving. On Tuesday, Pelley sat at the table alone, discussing Treliving’s dismissal.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Alongside the business management lecture, there was the familiar conflicting message that highlights every Leafs presser after a firing – the hockey team is a disaster; also, the hockey team is fine.
The disaster part is obvious. This team is crap at hockey. Most nights, they don’t even look like they like hockey. That is apparently a failure of alignment and culture, though Pelley wouldn’t say how or why.
“I’m not in the dressing room on a daily basis … so I can’t talk about the culture inside the dressing room,” Pelley said.
So the culture is broken outside the dressing room or what? And how so? People cutting the line at the staff cafeteria? Fist-fights at the Christmas party?
If you don’t know what’s happening in the locker room, then what are we talking about here? That’s the only room in the building that matters.
Having not really explained anything, it was straight to the good news. Despite being amongst the worst teams in the NHL, the Leafs are also Stanley Cup contenders. Not now, but soon. Like, 24-hours-after-they-hire-a-new-guy soon.
“A rebuild is needed when you are starting from scratch,” Pelley said. This will be “a retool, not a rebuild.”
The tools we’re talking about are the same ones that have failed to do the job for a decade, except now they have a new name.
The Core Four is gone. Please meet the Foundational Pieces (with Matthew Knies as Ringo). Pelley used the term so often that the media on hand began to parrot it back to him.
Pelley referred to Maple Leafs forward Matthew Knies as a foundational piece for the team as it moves forward from the firing of GM Brad Treliving.William Liang/The Associated Press
One can only imagine what putty the Edward Rogerses of the world must be in Pelley’s hands. This is how you speak fantasy to power.
The next leader of the Leafs – whether they be a president or a GM or both – must have one bonafide, according to Pelley. They must be “data-centric.”
As Pelley said it, the newspaper people on hand shuddered. This is a term they’re very familiar with. It’s an old English word meaning “an employment apocalypse.”
“Every single decision we make will be evidence based,” Pelley said. “Evidence-based decisions are never wrong.”
I believe Napoleon said something very much like this before Waterloo, only Frencher.
As far as sports updates go, none of this made a lick of sense. But if you listened to the tune underneath the words, the meaning was clear. The Leafs are getting out of the sports-expert business and into the business-expert business. As luck would have it, that’s the business Pelley built his career on.
After suffering through the gut instincts of Treliving, Brendan Shanahan and, one supposes, Craig Berube, Pelley is moving the Leafs toward a world where anyone with the right analytical tools can run a hockey team (or a baseball team or a moon landing). It’s a matter of finding the right people to put the right inputs into the right AI model, and then you’ll know what to do and say and you’ll never be wrong.
No one’s tried to run the Leafs like the skunkworks at a tech company. That’s brand new.
Shortly after he’d begun speaking, the Leafs official Twitter account reposted a snippet of Pelley’s comments in which he explained his winning combo: “It’s really vision, strategy, tactics, then you have to have the right people in place throughout the organization, and then accountability and alignment are key.”
See? Just six things, none of which are actual things. They’re more vague suggestions of abstract ideas. Simple.
Will any of this work? No, of course not. It never has, and it never will. But this is a new way of explaining how it won’t work to decision-makers who don’t have any clue about what’s going on. As such, it’s kind of brilliant.