I won’t be buying the Tim Leiweke Maple Leaf saviour hype this summer…

With the Leafs clinging to their playoff lives by a slippery thread, some fans are already turning their thoughts ahead to "next" (as in the everlasting sports cry- 'wait 'til next year'...) year.  Fair enough.  A lot of the enjoyment of being a fan of a team in any sport is watching your team build its roster, because that creates hope for the future- even if the current situation seems a bit dismal at times.

Here in Leafworld, I sense there is a somewhat widespread belief that President (or whatever his title is) Tim Leiweke has a magic touch and will be doing whatever it takes to turn the Maple Leafs into a winner.

Count me in the seemingly small group that doesn’t buy it—or him—for a minute.

I respect the views of everyone who posts here at VLM, and I think a fair number of visitors here like Leiweke a lot.  I expressed in a post several months ago why I don’t, and in truth, my views haven’t changed much.

There are three key aspects to any job like Leiweke has—one is setting a tone in the building, another is hiring the right (best) people to run your team (in this case, the Maple Leafs). And then there is the public relations, for lack of a better word, side of things- essentially how you handle yourself as the executive face of the organization.

I have no idea what kind of tone he sets in the offices of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.  But I’m sure he is a smart, passionate guy who knows business—and lots of famous people. I’m not in the building so don’t have a clue, but I’ll take a guess and say he inspires staff to be their best, and so I’ll give him a check mark there.  That’s good.

But for me, his public commentary since he took over at MLSE has been, well, shockingly out of touch.  It’s not just his much-discussed public stance about taking down old pictures. (I mean, if the current players don’t want pictures of old Leafs in the room, I could not care less.  But fans do care about the history of the team, c’mon…)

Nor was it simply his "parade" reference, or worse, his dressing room-splitting (and confidence-killing) comment about James Reimer that Reimer is “the guy we inherited”.  (By the way, I wonder if that helped the team the past few weeks when the inherited goalie, devoid of confidence and knowing the coach and organization wasn’t behind him, was suddenly thrust into action when the number-one goalie was injured? Yes, Reimer absolutely has to accept responsibility for his own less than stellar play, but that Leiweke comment was unnecessary and thoughtless.)

That was all bad enough.  It’s just that he seems to continue to want to talk about the whole “culture of losing” thing in Toronto, as though he is an expert in building championship teams.

All he is doing is tearing things down so he can (in his mind) look good to people when "his" teams get better.

That “his” LA Galaxy soccer team won championships is nice and everything, but he essentially bought superstar talent to win in a third-tier soccer league.  It worked and that’s great. He is now doing the same with Toronto FC, which is fine. But again, MLS is what it is. It’s not the NHL.

The LA Kings won a Stanley Cup, but he was hardly the guy making the trades and building that roster, and certainly was not the coach—or the person who hired the coach who turned the team around and won a Cup.

You’ll say, “Michael’s, that’s not his job—he’s there to bring in the right people”, as noted above.  And I agree. But how much credit do we want to give Leiweke for the success of the LA Galaxy and the LA Kings? 

Here in Toronto, he gave Dave Nonis an extension when it was nowhere near necessary—or necessarily prudent. Nonis is certainly a good hockey man, but the industry is filled with such guys. Is Nonis the very best executive the Leafs can attract?

Turning the Leafs into a Cup winner won’t be nearly as easy as it was in a 'sort of' professional soccer league.  The relative success this season of the NBA Raptors this season is interesting (and they do have some talented, hard-working players) but the Eastern Conference in the NBA is seemingly dreadful. I’m not enough of a basketball guy at this point in my life to know how many of the current players on the roster have anything to do with the General Manager that Leiweke hired last summer. The coach, who is really responsible for the turnaround as best I can tell, was there long before Leiweke.

In any event, my bigger concern with Leiweke continues to be his public comments, which inevitably leave me agitated and dumbstruck.

Let me take a step back:  I was never a Brian Burke guy (though I know many of the people visiting here swear by Burke). I just wasn’t.  He is a very good hockey man—shrewd, hard-working and, like our current coach, has a Cup on his resume with a team nicely built by his General Manager predecessor in Anaheim. 

But to Burke’s credit he put the final pieces in place to win it all. (Unfortunately however, as I documented in many earlier posts here, his claim that he always built his teams “from the back” was false.  He never did it in Vancouver, or Toronto.  Add up the number of playoff series wins his teams had in Vancouver and Toronto—the number is quite revealing…)

So while Burke certainly helped to improve the Leafs (how can we not appreciate the trades that brought Lupul/Gardiner and Phaneuf here?) and is a respected hockey executive, my issue with him is that for a guy who was supposed to be about “team”, he sure spent an inordinate amount of time speaking about “me”, “my”, “I” and “mine”—and telling everyone how much he didn’t care what anyone else thought.

In my experience, that’s usually a sign that a person cares way too much about what other people think.

So my frustration with Leiweke is that he is almost a combination of the blustery Burke and the old Leaf/MLSE President, Richard Peddie. Leiweke at least seems to have some instincts for the sports world, while Peddie was a business and numbers guy as best I could tell, who meddled in the hockey and basketball side more than he should have over the years.

When Leiweke speaks of a culture of losing and all that, I wonder how hockey people like Cliff Fletcher, Pat Quinn (right) and the late Pat Burns would feel hearing that?  When Fletcher and Burns teamed up to take the Leafs to exciting “final four” finishes in the early-mid ‘90s (and very nearly an appearance in the finals in '93), did anyone think the Leafs were losers?

When Quinn built contending teams year after year in his tenure here (and but for the vagaries of sport would have seen his squad in the finals in 2002) were the Leafs struggling with a culture of losing?

It’s only in the last decade, since Peddie’s ill-fated attempt to oust Quinn from the GM’s chair and bring in someone with zero experience, that the organization has returned to its earlier down times.  And even then, Paul Maurice (now so highly thought of in Winnipeg) and Ron Wilson, one of the winning-est NHL coaches of the past 20 years, were behind the Leaf bench.  Did either of them think of themselves as being part of a culture of losing? (Though Wilson spoke of the “blue and white disease”, as I recall, which didn’t help. Everyone seems to want to publicly blame what came before them, instead of just doing the job they are well-paid to do...)

I just find a lot of that kind of talk from the “top guy” (Leiweke) baffling, and a sign that he just doesn’t get it.

So he has proven he has “contacts”.  He can throw money around and wine and dine people.  But in the NHL, you need to be smart—Lou Lamoriello smart.  Ken Holland smart.  Sometimes you have to be David Poile smart, as in building a consistent, well-regarded franchise on a financial shoestring.

Business savvy, yes, but most importantly, hockey smart.

So whatever Leiweke does, it is essential that if he does make changes this off-season, he hire the best people possible—and then get out of the way. 

And if possible, stop talking.