SIMMONS: Could this be Brendan Shanahan's last game as president of the Leafs?
New MLSE president Keith Pelley may have a decision to make
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The easy thing for Keith Pelley to do is fire Brendan Shanahan.
Probably the right thing, also.
The difficulty isn’t in firing Shanahan — there is enough reason to let the president of the Maple Leafs go after 10 years on the job and paddling in playoff circles. The difficulty is finding a replacement for him.
This is Pelley’s first month as CEO and president of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. He likes Shanahan personally. He’s impressed by Shanahan. But he can’t possibly like or be impressed by what he’s seen from the Maple Leafs this playoff season.
And the challenge for Pelley, or anyone in a senior position at MLSE — including board members like Larry Tanenbaum and Edward Rogers — is determining where the Maple Leafs go from here.
When the players take to the ice Tuesday night at TD Garden to play the Boston Bruins, they won’t just be playing for themselves and their coach, they may well be playing for the survival of the team president.
Shanahan is in trouble — or should be in trouble. Coach Sheldon Keefe is in trouble. The overly spoiled players are once again coming up short — but next year, Auston Matthews will get a raise and William Nylander will get a huge raise and should the Leafs lose in Game 5, the company they work for will have the fewest home playoff dates since 1990.
They get more money; the company gets less.
This is an historical problem for the Leafs under Shanahan, having created a hockey environment of paying too much too soon to his kids, spoiling players with a country club environment in a place that has been lacking accountability.
At $6 million a year, Brad Marchand has been dominating the Leafs. At a combined $22 million, John Tavares and Mitch Marner have not been dominating the Bruins. Somebody is getting value for their money. That somebody isn’t Shanahan’s team.
That’s just the player’s math.
The NHL math is even more of a condemnation of Shanahan. They might only play two home games this playoff season. Which is the lowest total of home playoff games — not counting the years the Leafs didn’t make the playoffs — in 34 years.
Overall, the Shanahan numbers, after 10 years on the job, have been mixed. Since drafting Matthews in 2016 and bringing in previous first-round picks Nylander and Mitch Marner for the 2016-17 season — eight years ago — the Leafs have the third-best record in all of hockey.
Regular-season hockey — that’s an impressive number.
The only teams they trail — Boston and Tampa — happen to be in the same division. That, too, is impressive.
What’s not impressive? The playoff numbers. The Leafs are third in regular-season wins over the past eight years, but 15th in playoff wins in the Shanahan era. They’ve played the 12th-most playoff games in the league. Their playoff winning percentage ranks 25th in the NHL.
Worse than that — and this is where Keefe fits in, to a degree — in the Shanahan years, the Leafs are 19th on the power play in the playoffs, cumulatively, and 28th while playing a man short.
The special-teams problems aren’t just this season — they seem to be every season. The entire Shanahan era. He’s not the coach or the general manager, although he’s involved with everything that goes on. All of this is happening on his watch.
Over the Matthews-Marner-Nylander years, the Leafs have been the highest-scoring team in the NHL. First in goals, 17th in goals-against.
At playoff tine, though, that highest-scoring team ranks 19th in goals-for, 23rd in goals-against. That is rather horrific.
So there is no mystery, really, that Shanahan and the four general managers who have worked for him have built teams capable of winning in the regular season. They just can’t compete hard enough or strong enough at playoff time.
And in a place where the playoffs mean everything, that’s enough reason to show Shanahan the door.
The complications, if you’re Pelley, begin with team president. Do you keep Shanahan as president and, if so, why? This year looks worse than last year, and last year didn’t look all that great with how it ended. The Leafs have scored 21 goals in their past 11 playoff games. It’s possible Matthews won’t play on Tuesday night. And, again, the team that scored in the season, can’t seem to score in the playoffs.
The team built around four scorers — the Core 4 — the Shanaplan, the Kyle Dubas plan, whatever you want to call it, sure seems like a failed notion.
The thought you can load up on expensive skill and make it work in the salary-cap era hasn’t worked. That philosophy was given a chance — many chances in fact — and it hasn’t worked.
Pelley has a president with the Leafs in his 10th year, a general manager in Brad Treliving in his first year, a coach, Keefe, in his fifth year.
You can tie a lot of this mess to Shanahan. In areas where a coach can make a difference, like special teams, you can tie this mess to Keefe, too.
Either way, it’s not good, and it’s hard, considering what Treliving inherited from the previous GM, to tie much of this to him right now.
But the hierarchy tends to work this way. The president hires the GM, and the GM hires the coach, and if there’s a new president, whoever he may be, he might want his own GM, and that GM by extension, might want his own coach.
That’s not even touching the roster issues, which are many, assuming Treliving remains as general manager.
There is much to decide here and little time to get it done. This is Pelley’s first public test as head of MLSE.
There is ample reason to fire Brendan Shanahan. The question is: Will he do it?
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