Is John Chayka really the best option to guide the Maple Leafs?
4/30/202639 min
With news trickling out about the hiring of a new Maple Leafs management team, Jonas and James discuss the shocking decision by the franchise to reportedly hire John Chayka as the next General Manager, and Mats Sundin as team president. They talk about Tie Domi's involvement in the decision, the possible conflict of interest in hiring Chayka as he is represented by the firm hired by MLSE to look for a new Hockey operations leader. Is Chayka, who has been out of the league for 5 years, and has had a checkered past and an iffy track record as GM of the Arizona Coyotes the best that Keith Pelley could do? Is the legendary Mats Sundin, who has been out of the game and in Europe for the past 17 years qualified to run and right this ship? What will Auston Matthews think? Will Pelley be able to get buy-in from a frustrated fanbase and the media?
Hosts: Jonas Siegel and James Mirtle
Producer: Jeff Domet
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJonas Siegel· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Leaf Report with Jonas Siegel and James Mirtle on The Athletic Podcast Network. Welcome to the Leaf Report pod. Uh, James, you and I have been waiting to record another episode for good reason. Uh, can you take a second before we get into some of the topics of the day to explain why?
James Mirtle· Host0:33
Well, we've been waiting for there to be a decision with the GM/president search in the organization, and we thought potentially it might be imminent, so we didn't wanna record a podcast and then have the news come out that day or the next day or whatever. But now it turns out that they're taking longer with the process than they had originally anticipated, so time for us to, time for us to get back on the saddle here again and talk, Jonas. I have been getting a lot of messages from people wondering where the podcast is. It just felt like a weird transition period time to do a show, but we're gonna do our best to navigate the fact that there's still some uncertainty and talk about what we do know. We have a story up on The Athletic, if you haven't read it, about where the search process is at, and I'm sure we're gonna get into all of that now.
Jonas Siegel· Host1:20
Yeah, and I think part of it was just there's a lot of uncertainty and, and murkiness about the whole thing, so we didn't wanna come on and talk about it without having