On the Toronto Maple Leafs GM/management search
Luke Fox: The Toronto Maple Leafs are using Neil Glasberg’s The Coaches Agency to head their search for a new president of hockey operations. They’re the sixth team to use Glasberg’s agency.
Chris Johnston: GM candidate Sunny Mehta is a client of Glasberg.
Frank Seravalli: An NHL executive in a text about the Leafs hiring Glasberg’s Agency.
“1. Get paid to run search.
2. Search hires your client as GM (get paid again)
3. Client hires another client as HC (get paid again) The only question is if Neil can hit a superfecta: search, client as president, client as GM, and client as head coach.”
Frank Seravalli: “Further to last tweet about conflict of interest, this is the LLC shell game Glasberg plays to make everything appear above board. Reminder: We’ve already had one team terminate a search firm this spring for conflict of interest.” Further reading at Daily Faceoff.
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Sportsnet: Elliotte Friedman, on 32 Thoughts: The Podcast – The Easter Exit episode on the Toronto Maple Leafs and their GM, front office search.
** NHLRumors.com transcription
Friedman: “By the way, I mentioned on Saturday, I don’t think the timing is going to work out here between the Maple Leafs and the Blues on Doug Armstrong. It’s the second time, you know, the first time, as I mentioned, there were some people in Maple Leafs organization who wanted to talk to Armstrong when Treliving was hired, and St Louis was like, no. Like, we’re not, we’re not doing this. So they never did.
And I don’t know what the case is here, but I do think the Blues, like Jeremy Rutherford wrote an article like, the timing is not right for the Blues. I don’t think Jeremy writes that. That, to me, was the kind of the red alert of the whole situation. I don’t think he writes that unless he knows. And everything I’ve heard in the aftermath of that is that it appears to be the case.”
…
Kyle Bukauskas: “Is there anything else you wanted to add or clarify from the GM search talk we had on Friday?”
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Friedman: “Yeah, I just a couple of things. Number one, as I said on Saturday, I do think, I heard this from a few different people. I do think the Sunny Mehta interest is real, and we’ll see where it goes. That’s one.
I, this is my personal opinion. I also wonder about Kevyn Adams for this job. Because the more I’ve heard about him and what Pelley said, I think there’s a lot of similarity.
And you know, one of the things someone said to me was they signed Matsias Samuelson to a big contract, kind of out of nowhere, and they made an analytic bet on that one. And it didn’t start out great, but boy, it looks really good now. And Aapparently that’s a lot of the reason that Adams made some of the decisions that they did. Took a lot longer than I think anybody wanted or hoped. But hey, this is a results oriented business, and it looks that way now. So I could see it.
But I also heard on Sunday that, and I actually heard this internally, it was kind of like, ‘We’re shutting this down. There’s too much talk.'”
Bukauskas: “Oh, really?”
Friedman: “Yeah. Like, it got crazy last week, you know, it was the first week, and we’re all throwing out candidates, and I’m just as guilty as anyone else. I think the Leafs want to lock it down a little bit.”
Bukauskas: “Okay.”
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Friedman: “And I think the other thing too, is that, you know, we talked about the Zoom call, and I guess it was, as you can imagine, it’s been pretty intense there, and there are some people who don’t like how things were being portrayed, are kind of starting to push back and say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of blame to go around here.'”
Bukauskas: “Inevitably, when you get into this situation and the threat of big change coming, I can totally see it.”
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