These are bleak times for the Toronto sports fan.
The Maple Leafs tacked on a ninth straight playoff disappointment, this time after spending a few weeks building up a false sense of hope. The Raptors won 30 of their 82 games, which was somehow far too many because they ended up dropping in the NBA draft lottery to the ninth overall pick. The Blue Jays were buoyed by the mammoth contract handed to Vladimir Guerrero Jr., but followed that with a middling month-plus of baseball that has them already on the outer fringes of the playoff race.
And, so: Go Argos?
In fairness, this isn't an entirely unusual state. But what's different is that we're fast approaching the point when all three of those franchises are controlled by the same corporate parent: Rogers Communications. And once Rogers becomes majority owner of MLSE, a transaction that's expected to be completed soon, the question about the future of major Toronto sports becomes simple: How much of (waves hands frantically) this is Rogers willing to tolerate?
Recent history suggests: quite a bit, actually.
Rogers has long owned the Blue Jays, and while the corporate parent did change the baseball front office more than a decade ago, it's kept president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins in place - and extended their contracts - even as the team's failed to win a single playoff game since 2016.
There has for years been a suspicion that because the Jays draw good crowds and decent TV ratings, Rogers - both the company and its chairman, Edward Rogers - have been happy enough to let things tick along even if the team hasn't been able to sniff postseason success.
Over at MLSE, owners of the Leafs and Raptors among a large stable of teams, stability's been baked into the corporate structure since Rogers and Bell became joint majority owners in 2012. The board let Brendan Shanahan and Masai Ujiri run the hockey and basketball teams, respectively, and otherwise mostly stayed out of the way. There were rumors about the odd struggle over a contract negotiation or severance package, but because neither company could outvote the other, the status quo was always likely to prevail. One of the advantages of having an ownership group with many faces is that no one's quite sure who to blame when things go sour.
Success has many fathers, but failure's an orphan, as they say.
But Rogers will soon be calling the shots for all of the teams. Edward Rogers will be the most powerful person in Toronto sports. And as much as he emphasized a commitment to winning when the purchase of Bell's MLSE stake was announced last year, it's easy to wonder if he will, in fact, be anxious to make changes. From a business perspective, there's little reason to upset anything. The Leafs are a cash cow, and the Raptors were 11th among 30 NBA teams in average home attendance despite being terrible from the moment last season tipped off. The Blue Jays have an even bigger gap between their on-field and off-field performance, drawing the third-best attendance in the American League last year - much of it now sitting in renovated, expensive seats - to watch a team that struggled for months to score runs.
There are cases to be made for a shake-up in all of the franchises. The Shanaplan's quite obviously been a failure. The Jays under Shapiro and Atkins spent years patiently building toward a vaunted "window of contention" only to have it slam shut on their fingers. And even Ujiri, though he'll always have the 2019 NBA championship, went through a rebuild that left a lot of basketball observers somewhere between slightly confused and completely baffled.
Keith Pelley, the MLSE chief executive who took over that job last year, will presumably have considerable say over what happens with the direction of its teams. And indeed he did punt former Toronto FC president Bill Manning last summer, proving he was unafraid to make changes. But that decision was about as obvious as they come: TFC's been a disaster for years, in no small part because of Manning's decision to import a pair of Italian attackers on huge contracts. For Pelley, former boss of golf's European tour, parting ways with Manning was a gimme putt.
Ujiri is probably safe until the expensive team he built has a chance to actually play together for once, and the Jays' executives will likely get the rest of the season to see if their underwhelming team will find a spark. And that leaves Shanahan, currently surveying the smoldering wreckage of another lost Leafs season. Will Pelley and Rogers nudge him out?
Whatever happens, at least we'll know who made the decision this time.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.
