No. 202: BRENDAN SHANAHAN / His once-promising presidency of the league's Tiffany franchise is now on the brink. Recalling a moment ten years ago that foreshadows today's exit presser.
Shanahan left, Dave Nonis right, back in 2014. This time Brendan will be sitting in the seat formerly occupied by Nonis and checking out Keith Pelley’s side-eye. If your boss ever looks at you like this in front of the TV cameras, get your resume out there.
I wouldn’t cast today’s press conference down on Bay Street as a moment of truth—the nearer thing to a moment of truth would have been the drop of the puck in overtime of Game 7 in Boston on Saturday night.
Such franchise-shaping moments have come along for the Toronto Maple Leafs a lot over the last decade and when did it work out for them? Yup, last year a series win over Tampa Bay, which was not shabby, I guess.[i]
The last thing of any consequence they won before that was the 2016 draft lottery, which allowed them to score Auston Matthews.[ii]
These are the two most consequential wins that Toronto fans have to show for the last ten years, the tenure of team president Brendan Shanahan. Of him I will write today in advance of his appearance at press conference alongside the new MLSE boss he reports to, Keith Pelley. [iii] This is the first time they’ll speak in a public setting. Might be the last. Brad Treliving, the GM Shanahan hired last year, will very much be a third banana or fifth wheel or whatever.
When Pelley was hired in March, many thought that would spell finis for Shanahan, that the former sports-TV and golf exec was brought to remove and replace the prez and undertake a house-cleaning.
For Shanahan it’s not a moment of truth today, but a moment for truth.
I got roped a bit by a broken-telephone moment yesterday—I had heard from a source that I won’t out that Shanahan had been fired.
As many readers here will know it wasn’t Shanahan but rather coach Sheldon Keefe who was sent packing. Regular readers will recall that I wrote about Keefe about a year back, recalling when, despite his association with hockey’s least-liked reprobate David Frost, he won a chance to coach the Soo Greyhounds. Many figured that his history with Frost and Mike Danton (ne Jefferson) and others would kill his chances of getting a job in the major-junior ranks, never mind the pros. Here’s a link to the piece. No. 107: SHELDON KEEFE / “A lot of people think I don’t deserve a chance and want me to fail," Keefe told me before his debut as an OHL coach.
(You’ll need at least a trial subscription to access this in the archive. Any entry older than a couple of months old is behind the paywall.)
Some sports execs get a ten-year run despite less than glowing results—for those it’s often a case of lowered expectations because of limited resources or the perception of the same. Limited resources are tied to financial supports. This is to say, it’s means-based. David Poile’s long run in Nashville was like that—I once asked him about the size of his scouting staff in comparison to the Toronto Maple Leafs. “The Leafs’ warroom would need a conference hall and the Predators could all ride in the same station wagon.”
An exaggeration but the point is taken. And it’s not just the Leafs—Poile could have cited Detroit or New York or Chicago. Expectations vary from franchise to franchise by reason of circumstance. A team prez or GM gets the Senators or the Sabres or the Jets into the playoffs and it’s a win, at least a qualified win. With the unlimited resources in Toronto qualifying for the playoffs isn’t enough and being eliminated so early and so often is an unmitigated disaster.
I first talked to Brendan Shanahan thirty years ago. I have all kinds of time for him. We have always got along. Sons of Irish parents figures into it.
The powers at MLSE believed and the fans hoped that Shanahan would create a culture of winning in the organization when he came in back in 2014. He had three Stanley Cup rings to show for his time in Detroit and a gold medal from Salt Lake City in 2002. He was also not so very far removed from the game as a player—that’s to say, there were still veterans in the league he played against. He was in his his 40s and would understand the mentality of players better than execs in their 50s and 60s. He was a Hockey Hall of Famer and had played with a bunch more—he’d understand what stars are made of, what they’d respond to, what support they need off the ice.
It looked so promising when the Leafs won that lottery and landed Auston Matthews—yeah, would have been nice if it had been Connor McDavid that they had landed the year before, but what can you do?
Connor, Leafs fans feel your pain. The moment in the broadcast in the spring of 2015 when the Leafs missed out on McDavid in the lottery despite tanking.
Sigh. These shots of McDavid were pulled off a site dedicated to body language. Doesn’t take much intuitive sense to read this or, in fact, the photo of Shanahan and Nonis at the top.
These are troubled times for the Leafs. The media has been crushing Shanahan, although this headline from the Sun undersells the point.
I do love the one line from Lance Hornby about the vaunted Shanaplan for success, “the dog-eared blueprint that bears his name.”
The Star asked the musical question,
At the top of the week, all kinds of red flags were stiff in the wind. Mitch Marner sulked out of his exit interview with the media. Morgan Rielly voiced a despair that unlike others in the wake of a spring disappointments, one far more dire. Matthews stayed vague about whatever condition his condition was in. He missed two elimination games with something. Yeah, the culture of a team with a lot of well-compensated and well-accommodated stars was pretty shitty.
I think we’ll be able to read Pelley’s comfort with Shanahan and the prospects of the team president’s continued employment with the sound off today. Someone listening might get fooled. Pelley and Shanahan have talents for politics and might be spinning hard. They might put on their best poker faces, probably will.
I’m sure it will evoke that press conference from ten years ago, when Shanahan sat next to Dave Nonis, who served as a placeholder after his buddy Brian Burke got whacked. That scene figures large in this Shanahan profile I wrote for Sportsnet back in 2014.
Without further ado:
THE SELF-EDUCATION OF BRENDAN SHANAHAN
JUST minutes into the siege that was the press conference introducing him as the new chief executive of the Maple Leafs last April, Brendan Shanahan was dialing back expectations of a quick fix. “The first thing I’m going to do is head up to the offices and start going through our entire roster, our entire staff and bring myself up to speed,” he said, alongside and in stark contrast to the exemplar of radiant optimism who hired him, MLSE president Tim Leiweke.
I wondered about Shanahan at that moment. He looked so different than the all-star I met 20 years before. Granted, we age and none of us as gracefully as we hope, and the 45-year-old he better than the 50-whatever me. That said, the changes in Shanahan were striking. As a player he was a man-child, nicknamed “Big” after the movie about a boy in an adult body, albeit standing six-foot-three with a curb weight of 220 lb., substantially more adult than a young Tom Hanks.
At the press conference he was, as ever, in good shape, but hitting the gym to stay fit is different than training to play in the league. And his countenance wasn’t an exact match for the one on his rookie card or the one buried under a thick black playoff beard. Yet it was neither the Eddie Munster skunk-streak of grey due north of his forehead nor the accumulation of scar tissue. No, it was his manner that stood out. He had always been a social animal, a born talker. Just days removed from his post as the head of player safety in the league office and under the klieg lights at the Air Canada Centre he was as professionally grim and circumspect as a funeral director. He wasn’t going to wrap “truculence,” “belligerence” or any other five-dollar words pulled from Brian Burke’s well-thumbed Roget’s Thesaurus, nor would he impulsively let slip any impromptu coinages that might haunt him like “draft, schmaft” did Cliff Fletcher. “There are 29 other teams, filled with smart people, looking for the best players and that want to win,” he said. “It is a very difficult job.”
Shanahan had to know that a front-office purge loomed. Just weeks in, he was going to show the door to Dave Poulin and Claude Loiselle, two front-office holdovers from Burke’s regime. Likewise, coach Randy Carlyle’s assistants were gassed. Carlyle and GM Dave Nonis might also have been likely targets at that point—but only Shanahan and maybe Leiweke might ever know. Whatever stress Shanahan betrayed it ran deeper than first-day-on-the-very-difficult-job jitters.
*
By the time the leaves had turned but the snow had yet to fall, I sat with Shanahan in his office at the Leafs’ practice facility, just blocks from the bungalow where his mother, Rosaleen, still lives. The Leafs president seemed closer to his former self, telling familiar coming-of-age yarns: how he battled with his three older brothers; how he played in a house league when other hotshot kids were playing in AAA; how his Irish immigrant father Donal, a fireman, passed up a shot at a promotion to chief so that he could spend time driving him to bantam games.
One story he told with a flourish: Before he headed off to London to play for the Knights, he attended Michael Power, a Catholic high school and track-and-field powerhouse in Toronto’s west end. Shanahan threw the javelin and finished second as a bantam in the Ontario championship. Years later he bumped into the kid who came away with gold. The kid had gone on to a few provincial titles and seemed pretty proud of himself. “It’s great, got a scholarship to a U.S. school and they’re paying my way,” the kid said. “What are you doing these days?”
Shanahan didn’t go into great detail. “I’m playing in the National Hockey League,” he told him.
I had heard the story before but I didn’t stop him. He tacked on a confessional punch-line that’s telling, though. “You know, there was a bit of me that was jealous of him getting that scholarship and going to university like guys I knew growing up.”
Those who went the well-travelled route came away with degrees and white-collar jobs and owned resumés that would, years later, be red meat for executive headhunters. Shanahan’s education has never been a conventional one. Some lessons deferred are and will be uniquely his. “You might learn more from your disappointments and defeats than victories,” he says.
And a few months into his job with MLSE, Shanahan was plainspoken about the stakes in play for him on his continued learning curve in Toronto. “Success here would be more important than anything I ever did as a player,” he said. “That’s not to diminish any experience in any of the cities I played in but this is very personal and important to me.”
*
For all his accomplishments, Shanahan pointed to a forgettable stage of his career as key to shaping his view of the game: his stint in Hartford. Shanahan was then in his prime and anointed captain when the Whalers acquired him in a trade with the Blues. Before his second season there, he realized that the team was slated to relocate to Carolina but otherwise was going nowhere. Two versions of what happened next are out there. Shanahan’s: GM Jim Rutherford told him that he planned to strip the roster to the bones for a rebuild and asked him if he wanted to be traded. Rutherford’s: Shanahan initiated it and resigned the captaincy. Either way, Shanahan packed his bags. “If the team was going to stay, I might have felt differently,” he says. “What I took away from Hartford was [I wanted to be] playing in a passionate hockey market. Some people want to play in the quieter markets. There was a list of teams presented to me and one of them was an Original Six team in a hockey market with hockey weather, Detroit—the others were good teams but not Original Sixes. I wanted to be somewhere where hockey was important.”
Shanahan acknowledges that these days more than a few players don’t think of Toronto as a preferred destination. Defenceman Josh Gorges hammered home the point this summer when he told the Canadiens that he’d sooner go to lottery-bound Buffalo than land with the Leafs. Promise anonymity, a majority of elite veterans will tell you the same: If all things were equal, they’d prefer not to come to Toronto. They want to be able to leave the game at the arena, to go to dinner without autograph seekers lining up at their tables. Many just aren’t up to facing a horde of reporters daily and nightly. “Some players don’t want the scrutiny, and that’s fine,” Shanahan says. “They’re not for here.”
Those who accept the pressure and thrive under it, those who realize the rewards can be that much greater, are the players Shanahan wants in the Leafs’ fold. Shanahan was one of those players. He knows something about pressure.
*
The scene will still be fresh to all who got up at or stayed up until an ungodly hour to watch the ’98 Olympic semi-final in Nagano. Canada, ostensibly the greatest team ever assembled, faced the Czech Republic, essentially Jaromir Jagr, Dominik Hasek and a bunch of guys named Jiri. At the end of overtime, the game remained tied at a goal apiece and teams headed to a five-round shoot-out. Canadian coach Marc Crawford took heat for naming Ray Bourque as one of his five shooters and omitting Wayne Gretzky. No one was second-guessing Crawford’s choice for shooter No. 5: Shanahan. Told he was up last, Shanahan envisioned scoring the goal that would clinch a berth in the finals.
Not how it turned out.
The outcome known to all: Patrick Roy conceded a goal; Hasek stoned the first four Canadians; needing a goal just to keep hope alive, Shanahan decided to go to his backhand; Hasek had him dead to rights; the Czechs went on to the gold; Shanahan and the deflated legends lost in the bronze-medal game to Finland; and a nation wept.
A couple of months later I asked Shanahan if he would meet to talk about Nagano and the aftermath. I thought it would be a non-starter. Scott Norwood has never granted an interview and Bill Buckner went into refuge. Surprisingly, Shanahan gave me the green light. In fact he showed up even though he had a cortisone shot in his back hours before. He wanted to refute any suggestion that he was wounded or shamed by Nagano. “Is it going to make me crawl under covers and crawl up in the fetal position?” he said. “People who think that don’t know me. What happened makes me angry. I’d feel like a suck if I folded my tent and sulked.”
Sixteen years later, he seemed even more sanguine. I asked Shanahan how he was able to deal with a failure that would break 99
percent of athletes. To him it was just a miss in the shoot-out, the failure of a shot but not a failure of nerve. “I made a decision to go with this backhand move I had been practising,” he told me. “But then watching [Hasek] stopping everything I thought maybe I should just come down and blast it five-hole.”
The rationale behind that strategy: Against the best goaltender in the game, on the biggest stage that ever was, don’t test your nerve with a high-degree-of-difficulty move. Just go with the safe option and take your chances.
Shanahan popped that thought bubble. He wiped the thought from his mind. He wasn’t going to skate down the ice scared. He was going to be psyched out.
“In the end, I wound up going with [the backhand], my first thought,” he says. “Hasek didn’t bite. Had me all the way. But still I didn’t suck out.”
The takeaway: Shanahan hasn’t lost a night’s sleep about Nagano or likely much else because he trusts intuition and instinct. It’s one thing to be beaten in the crucible. It’s another, far more awful, thing to beat yourself with indecision or inaction.
*
Success with the Leafs might be more important than anything he ever did as a player but it’s hard to imagine that it will be more important than Shanahan’s greatest contribution to the game.
Ten years back, the NHL perfectly suited Shanahan, a knock-kneed powerhouse who scored low on speed and grace. He had a rare combination of hands and toughness, scoring 50 goals and racking up 200 PIMs a couple of times early in his career. He was a little past his peak in 2002, a surprise to be named to the team that won Olympic gold in Salt Lake City, and part of the ensemble rather than a lead guy when he won his third Cup with the Wings. The game had been kind to him. In the four years leading up to the 2004-05 lockout, he averaged $6.5 million per. His was a charmed life and you’d presume that he wouldn’t want to change a thing. Yet he did want change—not a single thing, but the entire paradigm. And in a way that no one could ever have foreseen, he was the catalyst. The circumstances were without parallel: World Wars never forced the cancellation of a season but the war between management and the players association did. During the lockout a few stars went to Europe, raked in some spending money and made it a busman’s holiday. Some sat at home. Shanahan did neither.
He hadn’t just thought about the game—he had studied it. Always had to. If he wanted to keep up to his older brothers he had to find every strategic advantage. When he made the pros, his lack of speed left him little margin for error. He had to know exactly where to be and exactly when to get there. And far better than most, he recognized that the NHL game had become a reductio ad absurdum. When he had watched NHL hockey while a junior in London, an average game had an average of 7.93 goals. In his rookie season the number had dropped to under seven. By 2004, it was down to 5.13 in the regular season, 4.40 in the playoffs. Few were skilled enough to score but almost all were good enough to hook and hold up stars and kill any pace in play.
Making it worse was the powerbrokers’ intransigence. Nobody in the league office or ownership was so bold to declare that something was wrong with The Brand.
Occasionally a star would express his exasperation—Mario did walk away from the “garage league” as he called it. Otherwise, things were just accepted as the way the game must be.
Shanahan decided to do something about it. Or at least try to . One player. Not 99. Not 66. He was on course for the Hockey Hall of Fame but would never reach the statue-outside-the-arena threshold. Trying to change the game looked like tilting at windmills. But he knew others who privately lamented the state of the game, and so he sent out RSVPs to elite players—to be expected—and to agents—again, par for the course. He also reached out across the collective-bargaining DMZ, inviting coaches, GMs and even owners, when management-labor relations were never more strained. “A cynic could say no one is going to listen to you,” he says. “But you can’t live that way.”
Shanahan’s name carried enough clout that almost all those invited wound up convening in Toronto to talk about what the game had been missing before the arenas went dark. The effect of the summit was felt long before the start of the next season. Rules changes were tested in R&D sessions with junior players and passed.
Nine years later, as a team exec, he fessed up to pride in the summit, both in the more entertaining game it produced and in the mechanism that emerged to ensure the game’s on-going evolution. “We did something that resulted in the competition committee that still exists,” he said. “It gives players a say in how the game will be played and what rules are implemented.”
Shanahan’s impact was recognized in the summit’s wake, the Globe and Mail named him the most powerful man in Canadian sport, a position usually reserved for a commissioner, network head or team owner. The media appreciated his contribution more than many of his peers, even some of his teammates, did. Wings captain Steve Yzerman was among those who complained bitterly about the changes. Back in 2005, when I spoke to him in Detroit after the lockout, Shanahan deflected the darts thrown his way and offered up a throwaway prediction that has proven eerily prophetic. “Everyone’s adjusting to the rules,” he said. “It’s going to take seasons. It’ll get down to the grass roots. Eventually it will be the only game young players ever played, and the game will be better for it.”
*
Some established executives would have been loath to occupy the president’s office in Toronto, especially after the new ownership of MLSE, the Bell-Rogers consortium, tossed Brian Burke into the volcano. But Shanahan signed on and not because of Tim Leiweke’s powers of persuasion. The president’s post exerted a powerful psychic draw beyond the public profile and Original Six cachet, beyond a salary that would rank in the league’s elite and financial resources most others can only envy.
No, Shanahan came for Toronto as much as he came for the Leafs. He never had a chance to play in his hometown as anything more than a visitor since he was 16. Now the team he presides over practices out of an arena that his father would drive him to back in grade school, an arena that he would drive to himself as soon as he was licensed because Donal couldn’t find his way, lost in his own neighborhood in the fog of early-onset Alzheimer’s. His mother, Rosaleen, still lives in a bungalow just blocks away.
The youngest son wanted to come to Toronto because he viewed it as a chance to win where it matters—and where it matters most to him. He won’t suck out, succumbing to doubt. He’ll see the big picture. The team, yes, but, more than that, the league. And the game.
The north wall of Shanahan’s spacious office overlooks the Lakeshore practice rink. The Leafs’ depth chart is drawn up on an erasable board that takes up the entire east wall, along with the depth charts of the other 29 NHL teams right through to healthy scratches on their AHL affiliates. Shanahan was sitting at his desk with his back to the Leafs’ morning skate, preferring to talk about the sum of his team and the others. Shanahan didn’t look at the thousand-plus names. Didn’t need to. After four years of whole winter days in the video war-room, he knows the league. Moreover he knows that each of the 30 clusters of names is an executive’s design—a few good and tested, others improvised, his largely inherited. All together they represent billions of dollars, just so much wallpaper that can be wiped off with a brush.
Shanahan owns three rings from his time in Detroit but he knows there’s no replicating the old Wings’ formula for success in the salary-cap era. “It’s not realistic [to hope for] Larionov, Robitaille and Holmstrom on our fourth line,” he says. “Those days are gone. Still, there are lessons you learn all along the way. I’ve taken a little bit from everything throughout my life. You value people who sacrifice, people who pull for others to succeed. The league can be a copycat league and everybody tries to copy winners [but] you run into problems if you’re constantly trying to imitate others.”
He has yet to articulate a grand vision, the ethos for the organization, and he won’t claim personal ownership over every decision—Dave Nonis still holds the GM’s title. Even with this chain of command, any personnel moves the team has made were discussed in Shanahan’s office and detailed in paperwork that crossed his desk. He will make it clear that the Leafs were charting their own course and not working from a borrowed playbook when they sent first-rounder William Nylander back to Sweden. And that parting ways with Colton Orr and Fraser McLaren wasn’t a matter of falling in with a league-wide trend away from designated tough guys—though the irony isn’t lost on a guy with 97 fighting majors on his career rap sheet, his first in his first NHL game at age 18, his last at age 40.
He will claim some of the hirings: 28-year-old Kyle Dubas as an assistant; Mark Hunter, late of the London Knights, as player-personnel-director; and a data-analytics staff that will transform the ACC into Los Alamos on the Lake.
Contemporaries landing NHL executive jobs—Steve Yzerman, Trevor Linden and Cam Neely among others—were regarded as team players, company men who bought into the program, no questions asked. Shanahan arrives in the executive box with a track record of thinking outside the box and an independent streak to match his late father’s.
Shanahan told me that he couldn’t go to school on the experiences of peers. “I talked to Steve Yzerman before taking the job,” Shanahan says. “I didn’t mention the team. He’s a great friend. Cam offered some advice, but I didn’t reach out to a lot of people because it puts them in an awkward position. We’re all once again competitors. At the end of the day we have competing interests.”
Ninety-nine percent of the time that’s true, but the one percent was out on the ice behind him as he spoke. When he turned around Shanahan could see three players sticking around at the end of practice: Jake Gardiner, Stuart Percy and Morgan Rielly—24, 21 and 20 respectively. All three defencemen grew up playing the game that issued out of the summit in 2005. Like their generation of players in line-ups across the league.
I asked Shanahan if it ever occurs to him that only two Leafs, Stephan Robidas and Joffrey Lupul, played in the NHL before the Shanahan Summit. “Not really,” he says. “And I never called it the ‘Shanahan summit.’ I don’t know who started that. I called a bunch of different stakeholders and constituents in the game. I offered them a free trip to Toronto and paid for the buffet and let them talk.”
Though he declines credit, he played a lead role in changing the course of the league. Now he faces the task that, by scale, seems reasonably within reach: reversing the direction of a franchise with hockey weather but not much else in its favor lately. He will ever talk about “team” and “staff” but ultimately this will be a summit of one and thus lonelier than that moment on the ice in Nagano.
The self-education of Brendan Shanahan: to be continued.
THAT was the exit line. Thanks for reading along. I’m sure today’s press conference will like be like the last few months for Brendan Shanahan … that is to say, educational.
For what it’s worth, I saw this photo of Shanahan going to a Leafs outdoor practice and thought how much older and wearier Shanahan looked than I remembered from the photo shoot in 2014.
Then I saw that the photo dated to 2020, a mere six years into his term. Yeah, the fun has been wearing off for a while.
[i] Not exactly equivalent, seeing as the Leafs won that series in six games. They were thus working with a bit of a cushion. It wasn’t a win-and-move-on, lose-and-go-home moment.
[ii] A much more consequential win than I envisioned at the time. I didn’t think it was such a precipitous drop-off from the first overall pick, Matthews, to the No. 2 Patrik Laine. Definitely wrong on that. Knock Matthews if you might, but still a quantum difference in talent.
[iii] I will have a soft spot for the win over Pittsburgh on the last Saturday night of the season back in the spring of 2017, when a Leafs team featuring seven rookies (Matthews, Marner, Nylander, Hyman, Kasperi Kapanen, Connor Brown and Nikita Zaitsev) needed a win over the defending Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins to get into the playoffs. It looked dire in Game 81, especially when the Leafs had to go to journeyman Curtis McElhinney in goal because Fred Andersen came up lame a couple of minutes into the second period. The Leafs trailed 3-2 when Jake Guentzel scored six minutes into the third period, but Kapanen tied the game and the winner was scored by Brown. That Kapanen scored about as unlikely double-overtime winner days later made you wonder if this team had some sort of “clutch” gene. Yeah, we were once that young.
Excellent piece Gare. I started covering the Panthers in 1994 and from then until the "Shanahan Summit" the game went steadily downhill, thanks in great part to Lou Lamoriello and the Devils becoming masters at the neutral-zone trap. Game 7 of the 2003 Finals, when NJ beat Anaheim 3-0, was one of the most boring events I've covered because once the Devils went ahead we all knew it was over. Still hard to imagine, but the game has been immeasurably better ever since.
Great read Gare. I recall Brendan from his time with the Knights. Wonderful reflection on his life dedicated to the sport he loves