Everyone Is Already Mad At The New GM Of The Toronto Maple Leafs

In the media tumult (which is to say dungstorm, only less crassly) that followed the introduction of new Toronto Maple Leafs GM John Chayka, the tweet dinging him for naming his children after cheeses was neither the rudest nor the most substantive critique he faced. But it was meaningful all the same, if only as a general indicator of how this is all going to play. Yep, the kids are already in the mess, and all they did was have a birth certificate. And not only are they in the mess, their father has only been on the job for a day. Their school days are going to turbo-suck.

That's how much the Toronto media cognoscenti in particular and the Canadian hockey media in general dislike Chayka's hire. They hate it in ways that only the fan psychosis micro-climates of New York and Philadelphia might be able to approach, and they have hated it so much that they have brushed right past the adjoined hire of Mats Sundin, perhaps the most popular living Leaf, as "senior executive adviser." That's a title for a job designed in part to serve as cover for Chayka and the man who hired him, and those are the two guys everyone else wants to be mad at.

And why, you wonder? What has Chayka done to earn this tsunami of enmity? And more to the point, why did the Leafs hierarchy, specifically president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Keith Pelley, endanger an already questionable rep in town and with the company by swinging from his ass at this particular offering? Death wish? Pending WWE career as a corporate heel? Insightful real-world casting as an actual corporate heel?

Well, let's start with Pelley, who is not a hockey person but has been handed charge of the team and all of MLSE's other holdings by the owner of Rogers Communications, the tactically invisible Ed Rogers. Indeed, MLSE owns all of Toronto sports and much of its internet, so it doesn't need to be sensitive to its audience except in the most macro sense. They prove this by charging through the eyelids for everything. That's largely Pelley's role, to put a loonie on every part of the show. That he is not remotely a hockey guy is, given this context, not playing well.

And Chayka is marked by his past experience not only as the youngest general manager ever hired at age 26, but the youngest general manager ever to be suspended for "conduct unbecoming to the club"—which was Arizona, now known as and playing in Utah—by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman for trying to get other jobs while still employed by the haunted clown show in Phoenix. He also largely failed at the hockey stuff, although it could be tough to disentangle his blunders from those of the bumbling Meruelo family that owned the team. Chayka is not why that team is in Salt Lake City now instead of Phoenix, but his work in that job does explain why he's been out of the league for five years, marked as underqualified, unaccomplished, and a bit of a weasel by an industry that takes such niceties seriously.

And yet Chayka emerged as a candidate at the richest and most prestigious team in the NHL, largely on Pelley's say-so, and the organization handled the secret so poorly that everyone knew he was the choice a week ago. This allowed the Toronto media a healthy run-up to ask (and ask, and ask) the dipped-in-poison question, "Why the hell would you choose him?" The person to whom they addressed these questions, Pelley, has a terrible history with press conferences, which only churns the water that much more. For members of the press eager to get their shots in, Pelley presents an appetizing combination of piñata and dandy, with glasses frames that tend to match his clothes for the day. That, too, is part of the weaponry the market has used against him. As for Chayka, his résumé speaks on its own, although the kids' names are now part of the setting too.

This was the show they offered on Monday, in case you have a half hour to kill. For those who don't, we can summarize by saying neither side was having any of the other. Sundin briefly and fairly adeptly tried his hand at diplomacy, but the long-held animosities between the Leafs in their current iteration and both the people who cover them, which is all of Canadian media, and the people who watch them made that a fruitless task.

This is an organization that has no Stanley Cup since 1967, no Finals appearances since same, and endured a spectacularly terrible season this year; even if the aforementioned weren't upset with them as a default setting, they would be now. Highlights from the press conference included a question from the Toronto Sun's Steve Simmons, himself a lightning rod in town who was the star of Brian Burke's last press conference as Leafs GM when Burke said in response to a Simmons question said, "One good thing about being fired is that I never have to talk to you again." Yesterday's question of Pelley was vintage Simmons, in that it went like this:

If you are video averse, the question when boiled to its essence was this: "Why did you hire this ethics-challenged charlatan when basically everyone I talked to thought he was scum?" Pelley's answer was, if boiled to its essence, is "Because I could, you posing detestable jackass." And that's a polite version of what they really wanted to say, which was: "Fuck you"; "Fuck me? Fuck you!"

This was on the same day that The Athletic's Jonas Siegel did a more measured but still slasher-film-level takedown of the operation that more fully explains the Leafs' current predicament as a bad team run by bad people, plus widely beloved franchise icon Mats Sundin, who plays the role of Switzerland in this scenario. And even the most benign version of WTF, as delivered by TSN's more diplomatic Elliotte Friedman in sitdowns with Chayka and Sundin, was still pretty seriously WTF.

In summation, this is the perfect storm in modern sport—a persistently unsatifying national-level team that is run badly, making an unpopular and potentially preposterous hire, as covered by an adversarial media that also (truth be told) wants the team to be good for emotional and financial reasons. Simply put, everyone involved needs and hates each other simultaneously, which makes for a even more terribly delightful and delightfully terrible relationship, especially since the odds of Chayka's hire working to the franchise's benefit are astronomically poor. Even in a diminishing independent media market, this is a ringside seat worth having, provided you don't mind catching the stray middle finger in your eye now and then. Even as a casual observer thousands of miles and a border away, this is what awaits you, and you have no complaint. This is exactly what it was meant to be last week. FY! FM? FY!