Last night in the hour before the Leafs began playing on the west coast, Keith Pelley fired Brad Treliving.

Leafs fire Brad Treliving
MLSE will be looking for a new general manager for their hockey team.
PPP LeafsHardev

My first thought was that this was a hasty imitative move brought on by Vegas making waves by firing Bruce Cassidy and hiring John Tortorella on a short-term deal to coach the rest of the season and playoffs. They got lots of press for being bold and decisive and the only team brave enough to buck the SOP of NHL teams.

I was going to tell you a cautionary tale about reductive thinking and the error of the post hoc ergo propter hoc style of thinking. B follows A, therefore B was caused by A. This fallacy leads people to say things like, "there's no such thing as coincidences," when yes, yes there are. Plenty of them.

"That cloud looks like a bunny," would have featured in the story of why thinking that, when it seems like such a seductive rationale for this sudden development, is a dangerous way to leap to conclusions.

It's seductive because it makes Pelley seem vaguely stupid while doing what most people wanted, which for the Leafs' fan is a win-win. And the only kind of win on offer.

I've changed my mind.

I think he's late.

Let's go back to last summer. Mitch Marner left for Vegas and there was no one at all even sort of worth getting to replace him. Brad Treliving filled in the team in a way that was obvious to me left open the opportunity to add a forward and a defender later.

The Leafs sucked. Craig Berube's system started to glitch out, and the players lost all connection to their own game and each other.

There was no point in adding players.

And then... well, nothing.

With the Olympic break leading into the trade deadline, the management had weeks to sit there and think about the state of the team. At that time they were able to make the playoffs if they played better than they had been. That if was the big thing. What was the reason to believe in the if? That the players had underperformed. Why would they stop?

Good question.

They actually got worse, which should have been considered the more likely outcome. It was by me, and you should know what I think of your stupid curse talk, it was the most likely outcome simply because they'd got a sniff of the playoffs in the first place on the back of a hot streak.

They didn't stop being bad post-break, they got worse, and the deadline featured an attempt to gather "assets" as some sort of consolation prize on a lost season.

It was not a prize. And if the trading market had been better – in other words, if more teams had believed there was a point to real effort in this playoffs – the take still wouldn't have been a prize. Calling it "assets" obscures that all of it was low-quality picks that would turn into players highly unlikely to be of any meaningful value. If they were/are, they are either too late or too early. Too late for this core of players, too early for the next one.

So for me, the inflection point was in the middle of the Olympic break, and I don't fault Treliving for doing what he did, he was hanging on a thread having to do something. I blame MLSE for pissing away the deadline, the month of March, and then throwing the team into chaos now, in other words, bringing it all down on the players to face the media.

And to be clear to the relentless campaigners for the impossible tear down, no I don't mean they should have traded more players at the deadline. They should have traded fewer.

This is the play as I see it: They have the things the Leafs did not have in 2015, which are elite forwards (plural) and goalies worth having. These are difficult players to get. First overalls don't often turn out as good as Auston Matthews, and they aren't all that easy to get. If you could manage to engineer trades for Nylander, Matthews, Stolarz and Woll, you would be years replacing them. Maybe as much as five or six years, not some fantasy of a one-year tank and then roses.

So the only option is to try again the way Treliving was doing last year, and frankly, Nic Roy would be handy to have. They have quite a nice list of other handy to have players. Some program of building around that and making the playoffs, and...

Look, I've heard it all before, that the Leafs need to be guaranteed to win or else they should tank, and that's nonsense. It's willful obliviousness to how the playoffs actually play out in hockey.

What exactly do you think they would lose if they try another roll of the dice? They have two first-round picks in the next three years, no matter what. Let's give it a go until we can't try any more. And then there will be plenty of bad teams to be performatively angry about and lots of picks to acquire.

The risk of trying is time, and this is the level at which there is all the time in the world, the cycle of a team rising and falling as players age and the youth is not yet ready will happen at its own pace.

I think Pelley should have done this last month. I think the deadline should have been about something other than weak consolation prizes. And at the very least, maybe the response to the deadline when Treliving was shocked he didn't have a clutch of lottery tickets to build some bullshit dreams on would have been the time to say... you know, this guys is not it.

My thoughts on lottery tickets are that it's a fool's game, and hope is not a strategy. Find a strategy, Pelley.

My fear is absolutely still that he liked the press Vegas got and he wanted that glow on him.

I don't hate Craig Berube. I just think he's the wrong coach for this team, and this move leaves him as the lamest of lame ducks, not having any idea what's to come. It's an odd side effect of this that he's left hanging right now.

In other news, important for the future, someone has to be in charge of any more signings at the minor league level, and the important post-season decisions which roll up fairly quickly.

At the very least, this helps to avoid repeating the very bad timing of Treliving's hiring so tight on the draft. So in that respect it's not desperately too late.

And my final thought on this is that Occam's Razor says Treliving and Pelley had a fight over something, and Treliving had to go now. I really don't think that is Bruce Cassidy, but you never know.

Did that make any sense? If not, blame the Leafs for the timing of this announcement.

In brief news:

Brantford Bulldogs defenceman Ben Danford suspended two games
Brantford Bulldogs defenceman Ben Danford suspended two games
Brantford ExpositorBrian Smiley

If you want to see the main event of last night's game:

- TSN
The Maple Leafs relieved general manager Brad Treliving of his duties on Monday night. TSN Hockey Insider Darren Dreger joins SportsCentre with the details, who may be in line to get the job next and if there are more changes on the way.
TSN

Keith Pelley will meet the media today at 2 pm. But he won't say anything much, because he hasn't got anything to announce. This was not a firing with a guy in the wings. At most, he'll name whoever is acting GM and say something vague about Berube.

Oh, and yeah, the Leafs got the lead last night with three third-period goals. Nylander with four points.

And then the Ducks tied it back up late, and this too-late game became the too-long game in overtime.

(It was maybe the second worst 3on3 I've ever watched and that goes for both teams.)

JT with the winner!

Saved us from a shootout.

The Leafs played half the game down two forwards, but it didn't seem to impede them any. Michael Pezzetta and Max Domi both got the gate for being an idiot and fighting respectively.

And that is it for now. See you for the corporate buzz words this afternoon.

From The Branches