Two things happened to “save” the Toronto Maple Leafs from the precipice of disaster, and they happened at roughly the same time.
The most obvious boost was winning the NHL Draft Lottery, while the second, and perhaps more contentious suggestion, was the hiring of John Chayka as the new general manager to replace the departing Brad Treliving.
I’m not a fan of the Leafs but have watched them my entire life. I’m certainly no expert, but then again, neither is any Leaf fan. None of the people tasked with running the franchise have produced a Stanley Cup winner in fifty-nine years, as any Leaf fan knows, these were the people who had all the information and decision-making capacity to make that happen, yet didn’t, or couldn’t.
I’m not here to suggest the hiring of John Chayka is a direct precursor to a parade down Yonge Street, but I will argue that his hiring was just the thing to keep this team together while it still had some sort of a semblance of a competition window to compete well into the playoffs.
When the announcement of Chayka’s hiring hit the media, there were howls of derision, pretty much everywhere I went. Even on my own team’s podcasts his name was uttered with absolute and universal contempt. To hear all the so-called experts, the Leafs just plucked some guy from the Canada Wide Warrant list to be their new general manager.
High crimes and misdemeanours.
Chayka was once the general manager of the Phoenix/Arizona Coyotes NHL franchise under the ownership of Alex Meruelo. To be fair to Chayka here, there’s a reason why there’s no longer an NHL team in the Arizona desert, and a lot of that might have to do with Meruelo himself.
Here is Chayka’s crime.
With still three years left on his contract with Arizona, he made the questionable choice to engage in back-channel discussions regarding possible employment with another NHL team, rumoured to be the New Jersey Devils. He did so because he felt his relationship with Meruelo was broken down to the point where Chayka decided he couldn’t continue to work with him.
Meruelo is an irascible scoundrel kind of guy who looks at everything through the lens of an investor eyeing up a distressed asset and evaluating its worth in dollars and cents more than its value as an asset of great cultural and community cohesiveness. The interaction between general manager and owner was further complicated by the meddling of Meruelo’s son, Alex Jr, who constantly had his fingers in Chayka’s pie.
To Meruelo, to the National Hockey League, and to the sports news media, Chayka committed three transgressions. First, he attempted to build a competitive hockey team, and that takes cash, and the Meruelo’s weren’t exactly the tooth fairies when it came to handing it out. Remember, they were never interested in building a winner as much as they were interested in building an economic asset.
His second crime was talking to another team while still under contract. Admittedly that’s a no-no, but honestly I don’t think it requires a recommissioning of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal or anything. Chayka was suspended by the league, and has “served” that time. I don’t think we’ll see him negotiating his possible future somewhere else while under contract to Toronto.
Chayka’s biggest crime is the most egregious. With three years still remaining on his contract in Arizona, he stepped down at the tender age of 32. He was, by far, the youngest general manager in the league with a reputation of being an analytical and statistical whiz kid. And the establishment types around the league don’t like guys with reputations like that.
Their criticism is fuelled mostly by their disdain for his age, his relative youthfulness. Many in the industry view a guy like Chayka as a threat to the status-quo.
In addition to the unforgivable notion that he’s too young, he also got pilloried for being a guy who no longer liked working for his current firm and went out to seek a better arrangement elsewhere. Something that happens, maybe what, a billion times every day without anyone having their reputations sullied?
This sulliness, this silliness, is the main reason why the Leafs were able to snag a really good hockey mind for their own general manager spot. Because of his reputation, nobody would touch him. Time will have to pass, of course, for an accurate assessment of Chayka’s body of work with Toronto, but I’m more than comfortable with him getting the top job. Tacking on Matts Sundin at the same time should provide Leaf fans with a bit of a security blanket regarding Chayka, because I think the two of them will be doing a lot of collaborating on major hockey decisions and operations.
We have to consider what Chayka inherits from the former boss Brad Treliving.
The Leafs were in trouble, having missed the playoffs for the first time since 2016. The loss of Mitch Marner was absolutely tragic, equally because of the loss of the player and the manner in which the player engineered his way out of town leaving the team with virtually no choices.
Team captain Austin Matthews missed a ton of games due to some non-defined mysterious ailment that has him travelling the world in search of a remedy. Obviously that ate into Matthew’s production. Add to this my almost certain assumption that Matthews, being an American playing in Canada and Team USA’s captain in the Olympics, would want out of Toronto as part of the American hostility shown towards Canada at that tournament. It also may have looked to him that his chance of ever winning a Stanley Cup was now all shot to hell with the departure of Marner and the sad state of the team. The strictly north-south style demanded by his north-south coach, Craig Berube, didn’t help either. Despite being an excellent defensive forward, Matthews is also an elite goal-scorer, perhaps one of the best snipers in the league, and guys like himself and William Nylander have to sacrifice creative talent in the interest of the demands imposed by dump and chase hockey.
The team’s defence was aged and on perpetual life support. Treliving and Berube both loved to talk about how their defence was a shot-blocking machine. That sounds great and everything, but doing that much shot-blocking also means you’re in your own end a hell of a lot of the time, and so the emphasis on such an attribute may well indicate a problem somewhere else, as in you’re playing too much of the game in your own end and without the puck. When your offence is predicated upon the dump and chase, aggressive forecheck, and offensive zone cycling, then by definition you’re setting yourself up for 50-50 puck battles all over the offensive zone, meaning that you’re willing to give up possession of the puck for an at-best even chance of getting it back again. You’re giving up half of your puck possessions just so you can effectively provide the opponent with a chance tp break the puck out and go back the other way, meaning that you can now skate your ass off to get back and do some of that awesome shot-blocking.
Honestly, outside of Jake McCabe, the Leafs don’t really have anyone on the back end that inspires a lot of confidence, and McCabe himself isn’t getting any younger at age thirty-two. And Morgan Reilly is not a top-pair defenceman really, and I’m not sure if he ever truly was.
Plenty has changed since Chayka’s arrival, and admittedly, not all of it is his doing. The Leafs unloaded their three top officials, the coach, the general manger, and the team president. So in addition to the departures of Treliving and Berube, Brendan Shanahan and his so-called “ShanaPlan” was also out the door. These departures represent a sea-change to the team. Treliving was replaced by Chayka, and Sundin essentially took over from Shanahan. But Chayka did hire his own new coach, Jim Hiller, after a search involving over fifty candidates from which Chayka got insight into how each would approach a coaching position with Toronto.
I think Hiller was probably his guy all along. He’d been in Toronto previously as an assistant coach, and he was more recently coach of the Los Angeles Kings for three years. He’s an offensive-minded coach, preferring possession, speed, skating, and offensive creativity. Matthews and Nylander are going to breathe a lot easier with this guy driving the bus.
One of the first things Chayka did upon being named GM was to haul ass down to Arizona to talk to his captain, Austin Matthews. With two years remaining on his contract, there was a real fear that he was a candidate to leave Toronto after that time with the Leafs getting nothing for it, sort of like the Marner/Sundin situations. Chayka had to get a sense of Matthew’s buy-in, because if Matthews was wavering about staying in Toronto, then Chayka might have to look at shopping him around the league to see what assets he could get for him while his value was still relatively high.
Apparently Austin Matthews is not Brady Tkachuk. Matthews was the captain of that Olympic gold-medal winning squad, but he never appeared to be terribly into the provocations that some his teammates directed towards Canada. I feared that Matthews would join an ever-increasing list of American players demanding out of Canadian cities. But so far I’ve been proven wrong, and that actually makes me happy to be wrong.
Winning the lottery wasn’t Chayka’s doing, but making the pick was, although most of us would have been shocked had he selected anyone other than Gavin McKenna. To be fair, McKenna’s not Marner, but neither was Marner when he was first drafted. As well, I believe McKenna to be a serious candidate for a 60-70 point season in his rookie year on an entry level contract, and you sure can’t kick about something like that. And honestly, there’s nobody you’re going to find on the trade market or in free agency that’s going to give you that level of production. Plus a player like McKenna should also thrive under Hiller’s schematic.
Signing top free agent defender Darryn Raddysh is also going to help. Raddysh had himself a career year last year when his minutes got bumped dramatically owing to injuries on the Lightning’s back end. I honestly don’t know how close the player will come to matching his numbers from last year and honestly, he was the top defender available in a relatively weak free agent crop. Still, he’s a definite improvement on the back end. He’s a solid two-way player who is poised in both ends, owns a boomer of a shot that always seems to get through traffic, and should be a mainstay of the Leafs top power play unit. Again, Hiller’s game plan may help Raddysh as well. Also, having Raddysh will likely bump Nolan Reilly to the second defence unit where he’ll be getting better matchups and not always out against the other team’s best skaters.
Something that caught my attention immediately was a trade Chayka pulled off with the Philadelphia Flyers.
In a surprising move, the Leafs sent goaltender Joseph Woll and defender Simon Benoit to the Flyers for goaltender Samuel Ersson, defenceman Emil Andrae, and a third-round pick in the 2026 entry draft. The Leafs used that 85th overall selection to take another goaltender from Finland’s Jokerit system in Juuso Ainasto.
Woll was a good goaltender most of the tome, but not all of the time. He was often hurt, and also seemed to be burdened by some sort of personal issue. So despite his talent, his consistency was suspect. They got two young goaltenders back from the Flyers in this deal, providing goaltending depth in an organization that recently signed former Florida Panther and Leaf nemesis Sergei Bobrovski. Bobrovski is getting older but he might just be the second coming of Eddie Belfour, an older and experienced goalie playing lights out well into his thirties. And Bob has some Stanley Cup jewelry on his fingers. That and the emergence of fellow Russian goaltender Artur Akhtyamov down with the Marlies, along with Dennis Hildeby, give Toronto some significant depth at the position. And they still have Anthony Stolarz.
But the real asset in that trade with the Flyers centres around that young defenceman, Emil Andrae.
Andrea is a Swedish product that falls into that unfortunate classification of “undersized” defenceman. He’s 5’9” and 189 pounds, hardly an intimidating crease clearer. But he’s also a good two-way player, great passer, and possesses the speed and skill to break pucks out of his own end. In other words, he’s a legitimate offensive-minded left-shot defenceman. Philadelphia already had a couple of undersized defenders so Andrae became expendable. He was maxxing out at about 15 minutes of ice time per game but just fell victim to the numbers game in Philly. But in Toronto, he’s now got a legitimate chance to become a top-four player on the back end and a legitimate offensive threat that will also benefit from what Hiller has planned.
So all in all, in this past off-season so far, Chayka has been involved in the acquisition of four significant roster-improving players, McKenna, Raddysh, Andrea, and Bobrovski, with three of them being offensive-minded players who more than likely will benefit from playing with the likes of Matthews, Nylander, John Tavares, and Matthew Knies. All playing under an offensive-minded game plan being introduced by the new coach. As well, these existing Leafs will no doubt benefit from having the newcomers inserted into the team’s lineup.
And Matthew Knies is not going anywhere. That wouldn’t make any sense and it would probably upset Matthews.
So, from Matthew’s perspective, maybe things don’t seem so desolate anymore. A replacement for the departed Marner, two new puck-moving defensemen who can distribute and shoot on the power play, and a legitimate go-to goaltender with tons of playoff experience and success. These are all significant additions, and there may even be more to come. The back end has been added to with a much needed type of player, while still keeping their collection of shot-blockers, that is if they can keep them healthy. If there is to be a significant challenge in the system, it’s the over-abundance of bottom six forward types on the roster, particularly Treliving, Berube, and Calgary Flames type guys.
I didn’t want to see Nick Robertson go because I feel he was a victim of Berube. Plus all the guy ever did was score goals. Nowhere in my universe does a guy like Nick Robertson equate to a 2028 fourth-round pick, but that was the trade Chayka made with Pittsburg’s Kyle Dubas, a former GM of the Leafs and an analytics guy himself. And obviously a swindler extraordinaire.
Nevertheless, outside of the Robertson situation, it appears John Chayka hasn’t blown up the franchise nor is he contemplating a complete tear-down to the studs. It appears that he’s tryng to do what he was trying to do in Phoenix, build the best team he can. Only this time he may have the money to do things he couldn’t do in the desert. And having the two Swedish greats, Sundin and Daniel Alfredsson around will probably help promote a healthier relationship between the general manager and team ownership.
In my opinion, the hiring of Chayka, despite all the terrible things being said about him, is a game-changer for the Toronto Maple Leafs. What it is not is a guaranteed ticket to the Stanley Cup final. But still, in my opinion, it’s a step in the right direction.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 