Shane Doan notes John Chayka hire shifts Maple Leafs power
shane doan is now tied to one of the Maple Leafs’ biggest front-office swings in years: Keith Pelley hired John Chayka as general manager and Mats Sundin as senior executive adviser of hockey operations in late March. Pelley called it the most important decision of his tenure at MLSE, and the choice put a five-year NHL absence back at the center of Toronto’s hockey operation.
“At the end of the day, this is the most important decision that I will likely make in my tenure at MLSE,” Pelley said in late March while referring to the hiring of the next front office of the Toronto Maple Leafs. The move gave Chayka the apparent lead role in hockey operations and paired him with Sundin, who had not run an NHL team and had not been around the team or league for nearly 20 years.
Chayka’s Coyotes track record
The appointment brought Chayka back to the NHL after five years away, but his previous run came with heavy baggage. He had been suspended by the commissioner in early 2021, after a Coyotes tenure that produced 70-point seasons in both his first and second years as general manager, followed by a third season in which Arizona missed the playoffs by four points.
That stretch never turned into a postseason berth. The Coyotes missed the playoffs in Chayka’s first two seasons, then sat 11th in the Western Conference when the 2019-20 season was halted for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Toronto’s unusual setup
Toronto’s front-office structure looked unusual and convoluted, with Chayka apparently in charge. That stood out even more because the Maple Leafs had dismissed Kyle Dubas and then Brendan Shanahan before making the late-March hire, turning the decision into a sharp reset at the top of hockey operations.
The contrast with Chayka’s previous stop is hard to miss. He was brought into Arizona in 2015 as an inexperienced assistant GM to Don Maloney, became the youngest GM in pro sports history at age 26, and then oversaw the selection of Clayton Keller and Jakob Chychrun in the first round of the 2016 draft about a month after taking the job.
What changed for the Leafs
The Maple Leafs are betting on a figure who had not worked in the NHL between early 2021 and the late-March hire, even as 25 general managers were hired in that span. The team also accepted the risk of pairing him with Sundin, whose long absence from the league makes the setup less conventional than a standard veteran GM-and-adviser arrangement.
For Toronto, the immediate reality is that hockey operations now sit with a new leadership group built around Chayka and Sundin. The choice ends the old structure, brings a controversial former GM back into the league, and leaves the Maple Leafs judged on whether this reset can do more than the front-office changes that came before it.
