What the Nonis extension likely means about Leiweke’s influence on the hockey department with the Leafs…

I’m not shocked that Dave Nonis has been handed the keys to the Leaf GM chair for five more years.  Though he has been on the job for only a few months, I guess it was somehow enough to convince ownership that he is the right guy for the job. (I wish the organization has shown as much faith in Reimer for his three years on the job as they have with Nonis and his six months...) I’m not sure I fully agree, but it is what it is.

GM’s generally have awfully long shelf lives.  They almost always outlast their coaches—usually several of them, before ownership realizes the guy they should have moved along was in fact the General Manager.

I’m neither a big supporter of or a constant critic of Nonis.  That the then “new” MLSE ownership group fired his predecessor and hired him without even considering anyone else struck me at the time as a bit odd.  I realize the timeline was short, given the lockout-affected season was about to start.  But I’ve always believed the Leafs should be willing and able to hire the very best hockey people they can; I’m not sure Nonis is in that league. I believe the organization did exactly that when they hired Cliff Fletcher (and Pat Burns as coach) the first time around, and also when they hired Pat Quinn and later Brian Burke.  But Nonis?

I guess you can make a case that he did all right in his time as GM in Vancouver (I’ve read many “defenses” of his work there), but truth be told, I’ve always hard a difficult time shaking my perception of him as Brian Burke’s guy.  While he is hardly a carbon copy of Burke (he has at least taken the Leafs in a slightly different direction than Burke had been taking the club) my sentiment is not altogether inaccurate, given that Nonis followed Burke to jobs in three different markets as an assistant.

That Nonis was fired in Vancouver doesn’t trouble me one way or the other.  Good hockey people get fired all the time. I’m more concerned that, while Nonis has certainly put his own “stamp” on the current Leaf roster over the past few weeks, he likely had to convince the new boss, Tim Leiweke, that he was the right guy to lead the franchise going forward.

My point is this:  Leiweke made clear a couple of weeks or so ago that he fired the previous Toronto Raptors GM because they saw the world differently.  So does Nonis now really have his own vision for the Leafs, or is his vision really Leiweke’s?  And let me say clearly, if it is Leiweke’s, that’s not a good thing.

I do not see Leiweke as a hockey guy.  Nothing he has said so far convinces me of his hockey acumen.  And he certainly doesn’t ‘get’ this market, for all his talk and bluster about a new legacy, championships and parade routes.  His comment about “inheriting” Reimer still stings (did he even know who Reimer is?), so I can only imagine how the young netminder himself feels.

(After seeing/reading what Leiweke said in his broad-based ‘apology’ earlier this week about the comments he made last week about “the past”, does anyone really believe the guy has a feel for our history or the Leaf fan base?) 

Here’s a question: what did Leiweke really have to do with the Kings winning a championship in LA? As good as the Kings were in the spring of 2012, they were an low-scoring, dull and under-achieving team until they caught fire in the playoffs and Jonathan Quick became, well, Jonathan Quick. That happens in sports sometimes—an OK team wins a championship because it peaks at the right time.  But it doesn’t mean the executives in Leiweke’s role with those “winning” franchises were the reason for the ultimate success of the team.

The LA success “formula”, the supposed “model” they used to build a winner, is no credit to Leiweke.  Winning the Cup once nowadays is no proof that you have found the road to consistent success.  Heck, teams like Tampa Bay and Carolina have won championships, for goodness sake, and I’d hardly say either of those franchises had a successful formula or model for success.  They happened to play hard, get lucky and  received great goaltending at the right time. 

So LA winning a Cup, while certainly a lot better than what the Leafs have been able to do lo these 45 or so years, doesn’t make Leiweke (who was no doubt involved but primarily behind the scenes) a knowledgeable hockey guy.

Now, if he truly understood he was not a hockey guy, but just another high-flying, cliché-speaking business executive who has somehow become a ‘somebody’ in the sports industry, I’d be OK with that.  If he sticks to building the businesses at MLSE, like Richard Peddie was supposed to do, that would be fine.  (Whenever Peddie actually began to think he understood the teams he ran, he made a mess of things.  Money, that he had no problem making…)

But I have this sense that, based on his supposed success running the LA sports empire he was part of (Kings, Lakers, Galaxy), he now thinks he knows how to build a successful hockey franchise, and I think he has, well, no clue.  I’m pretty sure the Lakers won in LA because of remarkably talented players—and Phil Jackson, the coach—not Tim Leiweke.  The Galaxy won (in part) because David Beckham wanted to play in Hollywood, not simply because of because of Tim Leiweke’s astute soccer sense and ability to attract superstars to any market he is part of. (Do we think Beckham would have signed with Leiweke if the latter ran a soccer team in, say, Cleveland? LA was the draw.)

On the hockey side, long story short, Kings GM Dean Lombardi master-minded the Kings success, not Leiweke.

So if Nonis is truly left alone to run the shop, I guess we’ll see what he can do. I’m still not convinced Nonis was/is the best guy available to run the most important franchise in hockey, but here we are. He’s here now and I’m happy to give him the time he needs to try and get us to that elusive next level.  But I’ll be deeply concerned if I continue to hear Leiweke talk and if I get the sense that Nonis is being unduly influenced by the latest MLSE hire—another guy who thinks he has all the answers.

I know many Leafs fans already like Leiweke’s ‘go big’ philosophy; that is, they love that he puts himself out there and wants to shake things up (he did so this week in the MLSE executive suite) and go for the Cup. That kind of talk can be very alluring.

Right now, however, it isn’t for me. I’ve heard bluster in this market before.

I’m guessing, based on what VLM followers have had to say here recently, that many of you are fine with the Nonis extension.  (We knew it was coming.)  If so, are you also good with Leiweke’s apparent role?

Let me know…