Why leafs stink

When the team falters, it uses high draft picks and a strong development system to rebuild. The Leafs organization, behaving like a true monopoly, has opted to use its money for a series of short-term fixes—Ed Belfour, Owen Nolan, Brian Leetch, Jason Blake to name a few.

These moves keep the team suspended in a kind of permanent stasis. Not good enough to fight for the Cup, not bad enough to effect-. Even that dubious strategy, however, has been stymied over the past few years, as the introduction of a salary cap has severely limited the ability of rich teams like the Leafs to spend their way out of bad management decisions.

Finding the most talent per dollar is going to drive success. And that suggests, as badly as the team has performed, the real problem exists in the executive suite, not on the ice.

Richard Peddie is sitting at a small conference table in his office at the Air Canada Centre. The point will be revealed later. For now, Peddie would just like you to know that he enjoys reading books.

Like many people in marketing, Peddie has a ready supply of anodyne insights that come out as perfectly formed sound bytes. You can almost see the quotation marks as the words come out of his mouth. Championships are even better business. Today, he recants. With his. Ask about decades of on-ice futility, he points to two trips to the league semifinals under Pat Quinn. Not once. Ask about his own performance and he rhymes off a long list of financial accomplishments, but later says he will consider his job incomplete until the Leafs win the Cup.

None of this is to suggest Peddie is disingenuous. This is what it takes to survive atop an organization steeped in four decades of backstabbing, factionalism, alliances and betrayal. In the absence of any urgent need to compete against the rest of the league, the power brokers behind the Maple Leafs have honed their combat skills on each another.

General Electric was famously obsessed for more than a year with the internal rivalry among three top executives to succeed Jack Welch as CEO, and its performance naturally suffered. In , already facing fraud charges over his misuse of team money, Ballard managed to force his former partner John Bassett out of the ownership group, then gained full control just weeks later, when his erstwhile ally Stafford Smythe died.

When Ballard died in , he made Steve Stavro and Don Giffen executors of his will, setting the stage for another power struggle.

When Stavro completed his takeover, he nudged Fletcher into retirement and brought in Ken Dryden as team president and GM. Pat Quinn was brought in as coach in , and took over as GM in , but by then, he and Dryden were hardly speaking either.

Stavro orchestrated the merger with the Toronto Raptors and the creation of MLSE in , but that did nothing to calm the internal upheaval. He was eventually squeezed out of the company in He gave up the chair-.

It was also in that the Leafs decided to replace Quinn as GM while keeping him on as coach, setting in motion yet another infamous round of internal hostility. Peddie formed a three-person hiring committee with Quinn and Dryden two men who both thought they could do the job perfectly well. According to people familiar with the situation, Quinn wanted one candidate, Dryden another, and neither man would budge. The Leafs were much stronger in goal, acquired some good forwards with offensive talent, had a good separation of top six and bottom six, but lastly, they went into the year with a full year of Dion Phaneuf and Mike Komisarek on defence—both were expected to be top four quality players heading into the season.

The preseason came and went and the Leafs finished with a decent record. The Leafs then began the season on a high note having won their first four games. The optimism and perception of the Leafs in the media was at an all-time high, some people talking about a possible home-ice advantage in the first round of the playoffs.

Yes, you read that correct, home-ice in the first round. The optimism after the first four games was nauseating. After crippling injuries to their Captain Dion Phaneuf and heart-and-soul player Colby Armstrong about 10 games into the season, the Leafs took a turn for the worse, forgetting how to play smart hockey, competing and lastly playing as a team with heart.

The Leafs play this season is reminiscent of a good old-fashioned game of Russian Roulette—it's basically put the bullet in and hope it fires and hits the target. On most nights, the Leafs have been firing blanks, and it's been the opposition who has fired and hit them hard.

It's as if the gun has six chambers and all six have bullets locked into them when the Leafs face teams on most nights.

The hot start by the Leafs helped mask the real problems facing this team—there are holes just about everywhere on the roster. In a nutshell, those are some of the major problems that are holding the Leafs back from postseason success, but what are the solutions?

Whether it be Keefe, Dubas, Brendan Shanahan, or one of the leaders in the dressing room, someone needs to come in guns blazing and whip the boys into shape from the get-go. The talent is undeniably there, but the will to win and the mindset that anything less is a failure is what needs to come next.

The Latest Opinions. Beginner's Guide Archive. The phenomenon, while not entirely common, has been known to happen. It even spawned a hashtag — TOpoo — that had Twitter users guessing the cause of the awful smell.

Where are the cows? In a mixed blessing, colder weather Saturday put a plug on the smell.