Tuesday's FTB: Maple Leafs revamp the performance department

The Toronto Maple Leafs announced today that the hockey club’s Sport Performance department will be led by Andy O’Brien as its Vice President, Sport Performance. In his role, O’Brien will oversee all areas of the Maple Leafs organization pertaining to performance optimization including Strength and Conditioning, Sport Science, Sports Nutrition, Injury Rehabilitation and Mental Performance.

Joining O’Brien’s staff are Dr. Craig Slaunwhite as Director, Health and Performance Integration, Jason Martin as Head Strength and Conditioning Coach, and Josh Crouse as Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach, while Dr. Jordan Shallow will join as Human Performance Consultant.

The press release above contains a great deal about Andy O'Brien, someone John Chayka has known for many year. O'Brien was involved in Chayka's very first foray into performance analysis back when he was still playing approximately 20 years ago.

O’Brien, 48, is the founder and president of O’Brien Sport, bringing over 25 years of experience to the Maple Leafs having held multiple roles in athlete performance across different industries. Most recently, he has worked for Cizzle Brands Inc. as their Chief Performance Officer since 2024 and Junxion Performance as Director of Sport Science, Player Health & Performance since 2021, while also serving as High Performance Consultant for the Florida Panthers since 2021. In his role with the Panthers, O’Brien oversaw a rebuild of the club’s performance and sport science program, while assisting with the design and completion of the Panthers’ new practice facility.

Previously, the Charlottetown, P.E.I., native held the role of Director of Sports Science and Performance with the Pittsburgh Penguins from 2015-21 where he developed the club’s off-ice training strategy and integrated sport science into the team’s daily operations. His experience working with NHL teams began with the Panthers in 2005 where he served as the team’s Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for four years.

In his time with the Panthers and Penguins, O’Brien has worked with four Stanley Cup winning teams (2016, 2017, 2024, 2025) across five appearances in the Stanley Cup Final and a Presidents’ Trophy winner (2022).

His private training practice has supported elite athletes in various competitive fields across both professional and Olympic sport, including Maple Leafs forward John Tavares. In addition, his High Performance Camps, which have been held annually over the past 20 years in both Vail, Colorado and Halifax, Nova Scotia, have regularly hosted his personal clients and the most decorated players in the NHL.

Names I've heard linked to the Vail and Halifax camps over the years are: Sidney Crosby, Nathan MacKinnon, Brad Marchand, Matt Duchene, and several other former members of the Colorado Avalanche.

The above link also gives complete bios of all the other hires. Of note, Dr. Craig Slaunwhite has the title of Health and Performance Integration, a new thing for the Leafs. On their organizational chart that they make public, they list medical and performance staff separately, and have always done so. Integrating those departments seems like a natural step to take, but I am reminded of Keith Pelley's talk of vertical and horizontal structure back in the spring, and it's possible that integration just didn't happen effectively in the past.

John Chayka's quote in that article also linked above from 10 years ago about his early thoughts on player performance are interesting here:

With increasingly concrete beliefs about what skills to emphasize, and a deep base of nutrition and training knowledge, Chayka established the National Hockey Institute while he was still an active player. The idea, supported by his dad and Andy O’Brien — before the latter became one of hockey’s highest-profile trainers — was to create a one-stop shop for young players looking to push past vague instructions like “get bigger and stronger.”

“You hear a lot about ‘work ethic’ or ‘compete,’” Chayka says. “I always thought it’d be great if you could actually dig into this and try to understand, in objective terms, what it means and if it’s even important. There were some people who I felt were valuing things that were irrelevant, and some who weren’t valuing things that were actually really important.”

It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that this area of the Leafs management and staff has been deeply renovated, or that it's now formed in a new way.

All of these new hires have academic degrees in their field, and several are experienced in a university environment in their discipline.

While a good number of the staff in this department remain, the three at the top are now gone, led formerly by L0uis Rojas, who had been with the Leafs since 2016.

Other than that, it's T25 time, and if you missed the call for voters on the weekend, it's in that FTB, and I will get on that today!

If you missed the Community Vote: