Pelley’s priorities in Maple Leafs’ front-office overhaul have NHL executives surprised

As the process to overhaul the Toronto Maple Leafs’ front office formally got underway, few would have seen this coming.

Keith Pelley declared the search for candidates to be “absolutely wide open,” but he mentioned one nonnegotiable that will govern Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment’s approach to identifying the right leadership mix.

“They have to be data-centric,” Pelley said.

The comment was so surprising because it’s not an area where the Leafs had been perceived to be lagging. If anything, it raised memories of a bygone era, back to when a fresh-faced Kyle Dubas was plucked out of Sault Ste. Marie at age 29 to help usher the Leafs’ front office from the dark ages in 2014.

Toronto may again find itself languishing in the standings, leading to the Monday night firing of general manager Brad Treliving, but no one externally was blaming the analytics department for that fall.

For starters, the Leafs currently employ Darryl Metcalf as an assistant GM in charge of hockey research and development. He runs a department that includes analysts and developers, and according to league sources, he would be considered among the six to 10 credible data-centric executives currently employed league-wide who fit the description of what Pelley is looking for.

The MLSE president and CEO recently oversaw changes to Toronto FC’s front office that included a dramatic shift towards a data-driven approach he wants to mimic with the hockey team.

“(The candidates) have to really understand data and the importance of data and where data is moving,” Pelley said. “Every single decision that we will make will be evidence-based. Evidence-based decisions are never wrong. That’s not to say that there’s not room for the heart, that doesn’t mean there’s not room to check culture, but it’s evidence-based.”

Pelley would not discount the possibility of hiring a first-time general manager to pair with a more experienced president of hockey operations. That structure would satisfy his desire to also have “strong hockey operation people with strong hockey backgrounds” having a key voice in decisions.

A neophyte GM might effectively be a requirement, depending on how rigidly he sticks to the data piece of this search, because the only true data-centric GM in NHL history is Eric Tulsky, an Ivy League scientist who is still very much employed by the Carolina Hurricanes.

In Toronto, the pendulum continues to swing from one pole to the other, with Dubas’ 2023 exit followed by a GM search in which former president Brendan Shanahan prioritized the need for an experienced hand, leading him directly to Treliving in a pursuit that was over in a matter of weeks.

If Pelley had his druthers, the exhaustive search he’s embarking on now would be wrapped up by mid-May. He plans to formally engage with an executive search firm over the next week to assist with the process and concedes that it might take until early June before it’s wrapped up.

His desire for the next front office to take on a more data-focused bent sprouted from at least two planted seeds.

Having spent considerable time assessing the Leafs’ operations throughout this season, including sitting in with Treliving and his staff at the March 6 trade deadline, Pelley came away wanting more. The Leafs didn’t recoup as many assets from a lost season as they were hoping for, sending Scott Laughton to the Los Angeles Kings for a conditional third-round pick after paying a first-rounder to get him a year earlier and settling for just a second- and fourth-rounder from the Seattle Kraken for Bobby McMann.

Pelley said he sat in the war room as an observer to “understand the structure, understand the process, understand how we got to decisions.” He later added, “I strongly believe that we don’t use data as well as we need to use data right now, and that will change.”

His other motivation stems from the potential competitive advantages the next frontier offers a well-heeled organization like the Leafs. Pelley never fails to puff out his chest while speaking publicly about an organization with an unmatched level of brand awareness in the hockey world. With that, he feels a responsibility to make sure it operates at a level commensurate with the benefits that come with that standing. That’s why Pelley is obsessed with trying to establish structure, process, alignment, accountability and culture — areas he acknowledged the 2025-26 Leafs fell short of meeting.

His search to fill in those front-office gaps will likely produce candidates without nearly the same kind of public profile that former players bring to the management suite. Several data-centric assistant GMs are already working for rivals inside the Atlantic Division, including Sunny Mehta of the Florida Panthers and Evan Gold of the Boston Bruins.

Wherever the Leafs’ search ends up taking them, it’s clear Pelley believes they’re in a race to modernize their internal processes.

“(Artificial intelligence) is massive,” he said. “It is changing our business. The whole thing with data is everyone now has access to data, and everyone’s going to have access to AI. It really comes down to how you utilize it and how smart you are with it.”

One consistent theme that emerged from conversations with multiple NHL executives after Tuesday’s news conference was that this wasn’t the kind of search many were expecting the Leafs to conduct.

“There’s no right or wrong way to actually run it,” Pelley said. “What I think we have the ability to do with the structure and the support of ownership that we have is to put a structure in place that gives us the best chance to win and gives us the best chance to have the most hockey expertise possible.”