Dubas-Leafs divorce akin to AA and the Jays, Ujiri and the Raptors, and it stinks on ice

Just close your eyes and think of what Shanny did for the shareholders in the marketplace of monetizing fan frustration. (CW/TW: This post contains a reference to the Chicago NHL sex-abuse scandal.)

May 22, 2023

To everything churn, churn, churn. What is this ‘off-season’ you speak of churn, churn, churn, and there is rhyme and reason to this move under Shanahan.

One only has to, it’s like Lenin said1 — look for the ones who will benefit, and you will, uh, uh… understand, man.

You know the Big Leafs News, which naturally came on a Friday heading into a holiday weekend, and do not need an outsider throwing another hot-take stick on the bonfire. The point of this space is to offer a fan’s notes on how to tune out the spectacle (stick tap: Kalle Lasn) and retain the enjoyment of the enjoyable parts of sports — the contests of athletic achievement, the most essential piece.

So, no, I have no thought about who should replace Kyle Dubas as general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Or who will inevitably become the next head coach after Sheldon Keefe. It is a load off the mind, though, that a sportsbook is offering odds on 39 potential Leafs coaching candidates, including 89-year-old Don Cherry. The chalk pick, of course, is the Proven Winner who did nothing for a decade-plus about one of his staff raping Kyle Beach in Chicago in 2010.

Who will be the winner of the NHL’s first annual We Forgive You Award, by the way: Joel Quenneville or Mike Babcock? And where might I bet on that? Sidebar: See why it is so hard for satire to compete these days?

Please accept this as a case for not having an opinion. Having a take is part of the problem. Pick the lane furthest away from the noise that makes you feel more bombarded than Vincent Tremblay during the darkest days of the Harold Ballard era.

What does that leave? There is the organizational behavior lens.

That sees help through the game afoot with Rogers and BCE, who own 75 percent of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, including the hockey clubs and the basketball teams. The Toronto Blue Jays, of course, are my baseball team. Rogers just happens to 100-per-cent own it.2

Sometimes it is important to mention the corporate umbrella. since it has become so deep-seated in the fan culture in Southern Ontario. It is a fourth wall you are encouraged to take a selfie at in the hope of getting on the JumboTron.

First, a quick review of a caszh sports fan’s Core Four principles at play:

Major men’s sports now exist only in service of “expansion fees and franchise valuations, a no-lose game for owners in the major leagues,” as Jack Todd deftly put it in his most recent column. Engaged fans, even if they are enraged, are good for those valuations.

Those elaborate media apparatus around every team and fanbase — and this goes for the sports network with common corporate parentage, the media company that has a client relationship with the team, and the really successful monetized YouTuber — all trade in the same currency. It is a currency of commodifying cynicism and frustration.
Stretching out Leafs talk through spring and summer really ties Rogers’ and BCE’s goals together, does it not? Effin’ A, man. Speculation about the GM, the coach, and whether Auston Matthews or Mitch Marner is traded, creates the cheaply made content that seems to be the only kind that Canadian sports networks can afford to make. That is not to say that is why these moves are made, but when you have to be abreast of the news cycle and content-churn is everything… well…

Is that healthful for us? No. It is an affront to whatever dignity there is in fandom. You should have the right to disconnect until the next game or season. That is honestly how I watch sports now. Two minutes into the broadcast, or even later, a game goes on. Once the issue is decided, the game is shut off.3

This is why, although he is by all accounts a great dude and a visionary, I can never watch a Steve Dangle video. He is acting out the wrong kind of obsessive fandom.
Commodifying cynicism is a better way to lock in that 8-per-cent annual return than selling hope. The latter may not get over as well due to the set-up of the NHL.

It is a hard-salary-cap league where about two-thirds of the 32 teams could realistically make the third round of the playoffs, and about two-fifths could realistically win the Stanley Cup. The 82-game regular season is basically the same as the first two rounds of a pro golf tournament, with a cutdown from 32 competitors to 16. (The regular season is also far too long, so of course the Players’ Association is willing to increase it by two more games. Never bet against Hockey Brain.)

Puck luck, injuries, and red-hot goalies are all uncontrolled variables. Playoff refereeing pushes playoff hockey even further into Calvinball on ice. Just relax and learn to like it. Of course, your self-preservation is not staked to results like that of Shanahan, who is the liaison between Hockey Operations and the corporate boardroom. But that also frees you from the management mindset that Shanny has to accept.

The novelty of winning the draft lottery and then winning the Cup is waning. It was fresh when Pittsburgh won the Sidney Crosby lottery and won the Cup four seasons later, capturing three in total. Chicago won the Patrick Kane lottery and won in three seasons en route to collecting three now-tainted Cups.

It can take even longer than that, if it happens at all. Twelve years from draft floor to Cup celebration for Tampa Bay and Steven Stamkos4; nine for Colorado and Nathan MacKinnon. Far be it to point that is still longer than the timespan since Toronto won the Matthews lottery in 2016.
All of this goes against the code of the self-respecting sports fan. This hearkens to the SportsLit episode with Glenn Stout in 2018 about the New England Patriots history that he authored. Paraphrasing from memory, Stout said the long-running Patriots dynasty had a recognition that “if you are trying to do anything but win, then you are doing it wrong.”

Why can’t we have that? It seems so uncomplicated. The New England NFL dynasty was not likable, and they were the perfect football team for people who only watch football between Christmas and the Super Bowl, but at least they abided by the prime directive: Winning, Nothing Else.

That kind of governance made pro sports. It was the kind George Steinbrenner lived by and got right the second time around when he was the best team governor in baseball with the New York Yankees. Detroit had that when Mike Ilitch was the pizza-magnate patron of hockey’s Red Wings and baseball’s Tigers. Sure, the dollars are too big now, but who cheers valuations and profit margins?

Careful, that sounds like purist talk. I’ll work to get past that.

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That brings it around to the executive churn that has played out after the Blue Jays, Raptors, and Leafs, to varying degrees, had their peak playoff runs from the last two decades.5 In each case, a power struggle ensued where the top sports exec either left and has yet to talk about it, or did not sign his new contract for more than two years. There is nothing democratic or meritocratic about it, and holding out hope that there is just fogs the mind.

The pattern seems to be that the team wins a bit, or even big in the Raptors’ case, and then the suit dummies have to throw their weight around. Their “black addiction of the brain”6 is control rather than winning the Stanley Cup, the NBA’s Larry O’Brien Trophy, or the World Series. Keeping people glued to their screens and complaining about everything.

BY GAWD, THAT’S OUR CORPORATE ANTHEM!

In that model, the Toronto teams are just arms of the banks and telcos — in a trenchcoat! — that preserve Canada as infamously risk-averse and backward. Please bear in mind: it is OK to do it this way when you Plan B. Brendan Shanahan so obviously did not have one.

Who makes a sudden change without a Plan B, because they have to ride herd the instant the team accomplishes the slightest thing in the playoffs? Ballard used to do that. So you are not hyperbolic if you say the men and women around the MLSE boardroom are no more prescient than a fellow still synonymous with being a numpty thirty-three years after his death.

Let’s review:

2015: from AA to Plan B with Shatkins

As a general manager in the last year of his contract, à la Kyle Dubas, Alex Anthopoulos went all-in with the 2015 Jays. He traded for two top-rank stars near the trade deadline: one-time Cy Young-winning lefthanded pitching ace David Price and multiple Silver Slugger and Gold Glove-winning shortstop Troy Tulowitzki.

The Blue Jays were actually under .500 on the day AA airlifted in Price. Starting the following day, they played .737 baseball for the next nine weeks until they clinched the AL East. They were hotter for even longer than the Tampa Bay Rays (.708) have been to date in the 2023 MLB season.

Blue Jays supporters, speaking as one, definitely got off on it. There had been so little to celebrate since the World Series years in the early 1990s. Attendance and engagement soared, and in both 2016 and ’17 the Jays broke the 3 million attendance figure for the first time since the ’93 World Series win.

However, the hive mind in the boardroom would not give Anthopoulos, a mere Baseball Guy, more power. It was all about controlling the costs of what created the buy-in before their next business expansion.

Rogers had a Plan B for life after AA. That entailed hiring the Cleveland guys, AKA Shatkins, president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins. They would be part of expanding the monetization, or adding “premium experience options.”

On balance, Shatkins have done a decent job. The rebuilding phase and the COVID-19 health protections made it almost five years between meaningful September and October baseball games in Toronto, but people care again. Entry to the ballyard costs more than it did in 2019, but it is prettier to look at, unlike the Blue Jays’ recent conversation with runners in scoring position. That shall pass. They are a competitive team, if not a true World Serious contender.

It hurt that Anthopoulos left for a lower-ranking job with the big-payroll Los Angeles Dodgers, then earned a World Series ring with Atlanta in 2021.7 So be it; so it goes.

2019-21 Raptors: Ujiri stays

May it never sink in that the Toronto Raptors won the NBA championship on June 13, 2019. A moment like that was never supposed to happen, they said.

“They” could mean #PleaseLikeMySport basketball bashers, various American-exceptionalism espousers, and not a few Canadians trying to get a badge by being cynical toward the home team. And most of their first two decades were comical; as the scribe Doug Smith was wont to say, they were a better story than they were a team. But win one C’hip, and you get to act like you won them all.

Raptors president Masai Ujiri is The Guy who fostered the functionality that made it possible to push for that Larry O’Brien Trophy. Ujiri arrived in 2013 to join a franchise that had never won a best-of-seven playoff series in 18 seasons of trying. Here is a fellow who saw what basketball can do to advance social change and bring people together — while being a profit centre, sure — because he lived it in following his hoops muse from his native Nigeria to North America and breaking barriers. And he was big-picture enough to know that pulling up the drawbridge after getting inside the castle himself is a bad look.

Basketball spoke to my ginger arse way back when since it was a game that is both adaptable for loners and worldly in outlook. On the first, and baser count, there’s more sense of accomplishment from sinking a 20-footer while shooting around alone than there is from tossing up a baseball and hitting it, shooting into an empty hockey net, or hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall. On the latter, it is relatively accessible and free-flowing, freer-spirited, so it brings you into contact with more people.

So the Raptors had a team president whose approach was brilliant, and they won it all, and still MLSE might have let Ujiri leave, or gave the impression they thought they would be fine if he did. After the championship, there were “no meaningful negotiations” between MLSE and Ujiri for at least 18 months.

Talk about knowing the price of everything and the value of no one.

Let’s roll with the story that MLSE chairman Larry Tanenbaum made sure reason won out and Ujiri was retained. That it took more than two years before a new contract was announced on August 5, 2021 is rather telling.

Spring ’23: Dubas and the Leafs

Same verse, same as the second and first, only it is the Leafs, so one playoff series win and some strong regular seasons as all the tangibles they have for the Dubas era. Even the Blue Jays have three banners up in the ballpark for their modest success from 2015 to date.8

Hockey execs and coaches are fired all the time when teams become one of the 31 teams that do not win the Stanley Cup. What stinks about how this played out is the reminder that logic, loyalty, and genuine pay raises are often a chimera. What happened with Kyle Dubas seems all too similar to what has happened to far too many of us in an economy with low unemployment but upward mobility seems even lower.

Now-now, I have been known to read too deeply into things.

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