Maple Leafs need real answers, not Pelley's buzzwords

The road to the Stanley Cup begins with vision, MLSE boss Keith Pelley was explaining this week at his press conference that had Toronto Maple Leafs fans covering their faces with their hands and peering, terrified, through their fingers.

And culture. And accountability. Also, strategy and tactics.

As he was outlining these various principles, which could have been lifted from the back-cover blurb on any book in the How to Succeed in Business genre, the Maple Leafs posted an excerpt from Pelley's statements to social media. Above the clip: "Vision. Strategy. Tactics."

Could there be a more meaningless way to explain your plans to reshape a struggling hockey franchise? "Puck. Ice. Sticks."

Ah, great. Sounds like you have it all sorted out.

Pelley, of course, didn't sound that way at all. He sounded like he didn't have the first clue about how to build a successful hockey team, which makes some sense because he hasn't been involved in building any hockey teams before, successful or otherwise.

A longtime media executive whose last job was running Europe's pro golf tour, Pelley could almost certainly help you out if you were trying to get a tee time at Royal Troon. But asked about what he's looking for in the next Leafs front office, he fell back on a torrent of corporate slosh that would have made Ross Atkins blush.

"Each team has certain verticals," he said about this year's team. "And the verticals weren't horizontally integrated, as they need to be."

Also, the defense kind of sucked.

Pelley said that the new Maple Leafs' capo, who will be identified with the help of an executive search firm, will, more than anything, have to be "data-centric" and will have to "understand the importance of data and where data is moving."

The thing about that: The Maple Leafs already have a well-stocked data-analysis department, which has been true for a long while. At no point in the past decade did someone, after one or another of the team's playoff failures, declare that the thing the Leafs were really missing was some nerds in the front office.

But also, every team and every NHL front office understands the importance of data in decision-making, to some degree. Identifying it as a key requirement in your successful candidate is like saying that, when looking to hire a pilot, you feel strongly that they should be able to fly a plane.

But he persisted: "Evidence-based decisions are never wrong," Pelley said. What the what? Never?

I am not here to defend the recently departed Brad Treliving, but I am (fairly) certain he was not assessing his decisions with a board and several darts. There would have been evidence in support of all of his moves, whether they were bad ones in the end or, er, less-bad ones. The nature of making trades, or draft picks, or free-agent signings, is that there's always going to be noise in the data. You can only hope your decision-makers make the right call more often than they make the wrong one.

What should be most alarming to fans of the Leafs is that the MLSE president seemed to indicate that there was a Stanley Cup code to be cracked, if only his new hire (or hires) could use the vast resources at their disposal to understand the data and use it to shape the Strategy and all those other buzzwords.

But there's no mystery here. Hockey, especially the version in the NHL playoffs, is painfully random. There are different ways to build a roster, different methods of allocating the payroll that is available under the salary cap. Eventually you assemble enough high-end talent, and then you have to hope that the playoffs break your way.

The Maple Leafs did all that, not long ago, and it almost worked. The mistakes only came when they ignored the evidence of all those playoff disappointments and waited too long to make changes. Since then, the mistakes have been piled on top of one another, including by Pelley himself when he entered this season without a team president in place and then sat on his hands when it became clear the Leafs needed a new GM or head coach - and probably both.

And so, the incoming hockey-operations boss will have to begin by addressing the mess that was left in Treliving's wake, a direct result of Pelley leaving his lame-duck GM in charge of the team's trade-deadline selloff.

Not that Pelley thought that what is left is all that bad, given that he says the Leafs, mired as they are near the bottom of the Eastern Conference, and with little in the way of prospect or draft capital, should undergo more of a retool than a rebuild.

OK, then. Maybe someone at the executive search firm will convince him of the folly of that idea.

Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.