"We need to forge the start of a new beginning for [the] Toronto Maple Leafs."The way to do that, according to MLSE, was to fire embattled general manager John Ferguson.
Seriously?
The way to turn around the Maple Leafs is to fire a guy that everyone thought was basically already fired?
The ground-shaking move to jolt the Leafs out of their almost decade-long doldrums is to get rid of a lame-duck general manager whose impotence didn't give him much, if any, actual power in Leaf hierarchy?
This is no knock on new interim GM Cliff Fletcher, who has one of the best eyes for talent in hockey. He's proven himself throughby those early 90s Leafs teams he built himself, in addition to amassing young talent for the Phoenix Coyotes before being summarily fired before he could see them become a legitimate contender for a playoff seed in the West. But this just highlights the real problem: ownership doesn't see itself as at fault, when in reality they're the problem itself.
Coaching changes and general manager upheavals make sense in certain situations. This isn't one. The organization's flimsy dedication to winning is a pervasive one that goes beyond those two posts, and have extended since at LEAST the days of Pat Quinn. His reign as GM has come and past, and so to has his successor's, and it's hard to see any real change.
Paul Maurice can be an effective coach, and in spite of his not giving Jiri Tlusty enough minutes, I still believe that he deserves to stay on. But the team's talent pool is deficient, with no real prospects on the up-and-up. As I've said before, free agency is a band-aid; developing and keeping home-grown talent is how teams thrive and succeed.
So the move, in the end, is a completely unsurprising one. MLSE barely showed faith in Ferguson's ability, but in approving his moves by not acting, the Leafs have stagnated. Ferguson, like the team, did just enough to keep his job. Unfortunately for Ferguson, that's not enough to Leaf nation. But in a strange twist of hypocrisy, the organization doing just enough to keep its job is enough to make the city bleed blue and white.
2 comments:
The leafs made a huge mistake in giving scottie bowman the proverbial finger this summer. I doubt that they will be able to find anyone that will want to come in and do anything less than gut the entire organization and start anew. Hopefully, bowman has no hard feelings.
p.s. adrian ima start keeping up with your blogs
-lyndon
haha thanks buddy i appreciate it. get more people reading- i like it when there's comments.
as for bowman, he's an icon who's done it before, but that's not necessarily what the leafs need. it's never going to work unless management takes a much more hands-off approach to running this team. that's what went wrong with ferguson- people kept blaming him, but he was never, ever given full autonomy of this franchise. sure, most of those signings and transactions were his idea, but management had its own agenda and would sign off on them, after all.
i'm looking at bowman and burke as the ideal guys to do the job- people who will take no guff and run the leafs the way it needs to be run: for the fans.
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