As much as I hate the suits at MLSE with the white hot burning heat of a thousand suns, I can’t quarrel too much with their deliberate pace on this hiring decision to date. It’s a tough decision, and one that will have far-reaching consequences for the future of the organization. The reason that I despise the current board is, of course, its abject failure to avoid meddling with the affairs of the hockey team over the last few years, coupled with its failure to install a chief executive 
with sufficient vision and experience to plan for success in the post-lockout environment. That having been said, it would appear that the board has, since the firing of John Ferguson Jr., made the right decision: to correct its mistake in that regard and hire a top-quality chief executive to whom control over the hockey operations will be ceded. In other words, MLSE has decided that maybe they ought not to do this job themselves. I congratulate them for making the right call at this critical first step of the decision-making process; it is so obviously the right decision, it’s kind of like congratulating your kid for deciding (for the third day this week!) not to eat a jar of paste while at school, but it’s important to celebrate even modest successes with those who have intellectual challenges and to positively re-inforce behaviour we want to encourage. So yay, MLSE!
Step two of the hiring process was to find the right person to replace John Ferguson Jr. Apparently unable to locate a person with the right credentials on a permanent basis last spring, the club turned to Cliff Fletcher and asked him to act as steward of the club’s fortunes during the initial stages of the rebuilding process. In doing so, the Leafs successfully managed to put one foot in front of the other. (Again, yay!) Fletcher has, it must be said, acquitted himself quite well since his appointment: he made a deal on draft day that got the Leafs into position to pick up Luke Schenn; he signed Niklas Hagman and Jeff Finger; for every questionable acquisition (Ryan Hollweg), there has been a great pickup (I’m looking at you, Mikhail Grabovski); for every Jamal Mayers, a Mike Van Ryn. It is too early to say whether these players, and others (such as recently acquired Lee Stempniak ) constitute the necessary pieces of the puzzle, though it is unlikely that they form the core of a Cup winning team. To get there, some of these assets will have to be moved elsewhere, and fresh talent added to the basic building blocks at a later date. At this stage, as we’ve been told by team officials, it’s not about wins and losses: it’s about changing a culture of entitlement that had settled over the dressing room – a debilitating malaise that somehow begun interfering with the players’ performance. At step two, Cliff Fletcher earns the MLSE another passing grade.
for either post as he has no prior coaching experience of any kind whatsoever and has learned everything he knows about the NHL by playing EA Sports’ NHL’04 on his Playstation 2. Prior to working with McDonald’s, Fitzgibbons (pictured at right) was employed by Eaton’s Canada on a “seasonal basis”.