The Maple Leafs’ Interview Process Could Matter More Than the Hiring Itself

Earlier this week, Chris Pronger mentioned on OverDrive that he spoke with MLSE during their search for a president of hockey operations role. He said the conversation with Keith Pelley went well, that he laid out what he believed the Toronto Maple Leafs needed, and that he left with good impressions — even if the job eventually went in a different direction.

This Sounds Like a String of Interviews, But It Was Bigger Than That for the Maple Leafs

Tucked away inside what sounds like a routine hiring process is actually the most revealing part of what has been happening with the Maple Leafs. As a retired academic researcher who has engaged in this process many times, I see this as a golden opportunity to collect research data. Because if you step back from it, what the Maple Leafs were really doing this offseason wasn’t just “interviewing candidates.” In theory, Pelley could have conducted a full-scale organizational audit before hiring John Chayka. At least, that’s what a smart organization would treat it as.

The problem is that most teams might not actually structure it that way. They collect opinions, hold meetings, speak to candidates, and then ultimately make decisions based on a mix of instinct, reputation, familiarity, and urgency. But if you treated this like a serious research exercise rather than a hiring sprint, it would look very different.

What Questions Would a Smart Interviewer Ask Leadership Candidates?

A smart interviewer wouldn’t just ask themselves, “Who should run the team?” They would ask a much smaller set of very consistent, very controlled questions to every single candidate, whether it’s a former executive, a former player, or a hockey mind brought in for perspective.

If you were running this like a structured research project, there are really only a handful of key questions that matter. As a researcher, let me speculate what these might be.

Question One: What, in your view, is the biggest structural flaw in the modern Maple Leafs organization?

Answers to this question would move beyond surface-level issues and roster choices. It would get at foundational identity problems and how to improve the team.

Question Two: How should a contending NHL team allocate resources between elite talent, depth, and development in a hard salary cap system?

This gets at team philosophy and gathers insights into the factors that actually separate organizations in the long term.

Question Three: What specifically changes in a roster that wins in the playoffs compared to one that wins in the regular season?

This is where you separate narrative thinkers from tactical thinkers.

Question Four: If you were hired tomorrow, what are the first three irreversible decisions you would make?

This forces prioritization. No vague “culture change” answers allowed.

How Valuable Would the Data the Maple Leafs Collected Be?

Now imagine every candidate answering those same four basic questions, along with all the sub-questions and conversations that would have ensued. Any intelligent organization would have recorded and transcribed these conversations into valuable research data. How insightful would the insights and the conversations thereafter be?

Any wise organization would not have treated these interviews as isolated events. They would have recorded, transcribed, and analyzed what these great hockey minds thought. Agree or not, every point would be worth considering — even if it gets moved into the “We disagree” bin.

The Process Is So Much More Than Simply Hiring a Coach or GM

In the end, the real value in a process like this isn’t just who you hire. It’s what you learn before you hire anyone.

If the Maple Leafs were doing this the right way, someone in the room would be acting like a researcher rather than a talent scout or a negotiator. They would become a collector and an analyst of ideas. Every answer would be logged. Every pattern would be identified. Contradictions would be flagged. By the time you were done, you could literally build a map of how the hockey world thinks about your organization.

Then, after all the interviews, you might hire a candidate. This would be the person who was selling what you wanted to buy. But, you don’t just say, “We liked this candidate because …” You ask a far deeper question: What did 25 of the smartest hockey minds in the world just collectively tell us about our own organization?

That’s the Hidden Gold in This Process

Because that is the real gold hidden inside a GM search. It’s not just who gets the job, but whether the organization actually listens to what it was told when it had the chance to ask.

And when you zoom out and actually think about the calibre of voices that were likely in that room — Mike Gillis, Chris Pronger, Jay Woodcroft, David Carle, and a long list of others with very different hockey backgrounds — it starts to look less like a simple job search and more like a rare intelligence-gathering exercise for a franchise trying to understand itself.

Because those four names alone already give you completely different lenses on the game.