We mostly look at the inner chamber of NHL hockey, the centre of the whole complex system, and we look so close the rest becomes invisible, like trying to see a snow drift by looking at a snowflake close up.

Who scored, how much, who won.

But a thing you can see watching this innermost central bit of hockey is that no one can just choose to score goals or make saves. You hear that so much – he's gotta make that save, he's gotta score that – that you can start believing in the idea that you pick which times the puck goes in in all cases. But you can't.

You get to choose the things that make scoring happen or not happen depending on where you are on the ice. There are a lot of those things, though, so it's not weird that we all fixate on the end result, the output not the input, because the input is too complex to really process.

Micah Blake McCurdy has said that the key choice in hockey is when a player decides to give away the puck by taking a shot. I think that's where we should start, when we seek out who makes things happen in hockey. What goes into that choice? It's not just that he ended up with the puck by some means, so he shoots in a random way. He makes a risk assessment. Remember, he's giving the puck away here, investing the puck he has in the opportunity to get a goal.

Start here with the player shooting, but go backwards in time.

We're not shooting, we're risk assessing. How risky? How dangerous is it to give that puck away, what are the chances it becomes a goal given the shooter, the goalie, the people in between, the spot on the ice?

Now we're not shooting we're picking our spot on the ice. How did we get there? What was our expectation in how we moved around the offensive zone? Who gave us the puck, and when? Did we get it ourselves?

Now we don't have the puck, we're moving into a place to take a pass. How are we moving? Screamingly fast, laterally, deceptively, right for the net front?

Now we aren't in the offensive zone yet, we're on the way. How to we get there? Who carries the puck, or is it acquired in-zone?

Now we are just going over the boards to take a shift. Why were we going? Was it the mindless roll of lines or do we always go when the play is headed north?

Now we're the coach, making that choice in-game. Now we're at practice, in the locker room, in the office, in the parking lot, shaking hands getting hired, and now we're the GM hiring a coach, and back and back and back and up and up and up.

Up through layer after layer to the highest point.

Each layer has the same form, though, did you notice that on the trip?

The player makes his choices from his own ability and inclinations, but within his understanding of how to play hockey. That's tactics. How you shoot or move or skate. Do you hit the puck away from the other guy or do you strip it off his stick? Do you lurk like a patient predator for him to pass and then steal it or do you make him cough it up?

Now the edge between tactics and strategy is blurring, and soon we're in the higher level of how to get that goal. The overall process how, not the individual procedure how.

The coach has to set that process. And he has to set that in a way that the players are able to do, and it has to be a process that begets procedures that can lead to winning. The coach has to know what those are. The player executes, and part of execution is making choices in tune with the strategy, while also executing tactics that can succeed.

The GM does two layers of this repeating pattern. He chooses the players and he chooses the coach, and he has some control over the strategic choices of the coach. This is the first very blurry and messy nexus in a hockey team's structure, the one you can't really chain of command your way out of.

The thing we call culture and identity or who a team is, which is how they play and how they behave while playing distilled down a bit too much, is decided at all these layers. And no two teams are the same in terms of how much the GM draws up the high level concept of a team's play and how much the coach does.

Who they are in the culture sense, though, informs the processes and procedures the coach designs, and who they are as individuals informs the way the procedures they are capable of fit into the process. However this is done, the team-level strategy has to be one that causes the players to do the things that lead to winning.

And then go up another level and the team ownership has goals they want to meet. These aren't always as simple as: Get a goal, one more than them, do it again tomorrow. The culture, the higher level strategy of a team can be about selling an idea of who the team is because they want to make more money or because that's the kind of idea they want to be associated with. Or because they just feel like that's the right way to be and haven't ever examined why.

To use the most extreme example, first the New Jersey Devils had to be okay with everyone calling them boring, to be willing to be dull, then they became who they were in a way that could win games. Then they won the Cup.

So these things go down and down, multiplying out and out as more people are doing procedures from their understanding of processes bounded by their own proclivities.

This does make it hard to do the blame game. Because the fault and the credit filters up and down through this system. So instead we need to look at responsibility.

Rogers essentially owns MLSE outright. It's not done yet, signed off on, but it will be. They have to set their conditions first. Who are they? What do they want? What methods and processes are they comfortable with? Are they selling an idea or do they just want wins of any kind? Is cost an issue or not?

If they just want wins, then they are by default handing the decision to Keith Pelley, and then we ask the same questions of him, who does he want the team to be, is this a narrow definition? If you are error testing some code, you have to decide what success is first, so what's his non-error outcome?

If he has a really wide and nonspecific answer, which is what he gave at his pressor to explain the top-level vision, then he is by default handing the ball to the head of hockey ops (he won't use the word GM) who he is about to hire. He could be very generalist about it. Interview some candidates and pick one based on their overall quality, not their specific fitness to build processes to fulfill the particular strategy Pelley wants. Just the ability to build processes in general. Maybe Pelley wants his head of hockey ops candidates to bring the strategy with them.

This is the real decision to be made, and it's not clear, beyond the obvious fact that Rogers would rather the Leafs win a lot, how much that vision has been translated into a strategy already. Datacentric is part of the picture, but it's a way of thinking, not a particular thought. The question is who is setting the strategy at the macro level for the actual hockey part of the hockey? If Pelley is there to set strategies for each MLSE property in a very generalist way, then he's going to let whoever he hires set the strategy for the team.

MLSE owns a bunch of teams. Each one full of layers of identical shape that go down and down into the mind of a basketball player of a football player, and eventually, a baseball player. How is he setting the higher level strategy for the Leafs and all of that too? But there is some indication he's taken a more hands-on approach to TFC.

This is why you get so much speculation about hiring a President of Hockey Operations and a GM. We have also seen some ideas that the GM-like person will have someone below them in the chain who communicates up to Pelley and MLSE avoiding the need for the President role. There isn't anyone above General Manager on the Raptors or TFC now. So, we shouldn't expect anything different with the Leafs by default.

This puts Pelley right now in the position of handing the ship over to the new captain and telling him to pick where to go and how to get there.

Note: this bit has been added after the fact in response to comments yesterday.

What I haven't considered before now is that without a President overseeing the GM, there isn't anyone assessing success or failure. This could be why we have the dichotomy of Pelley supposedly talking with Treliving about an extension and then firing him a month later. But if Pelley is not interested in a President in the Maple Leafs offices, someone still has to do more than just communicate up, they have to assess. So this might be the simple answer to why he wants a "head of hockey operations" in the singular. He's reserving control over assessment to himself.

I think Brad Treliving's biggest failure was in setting an identity and culture as a concept in his mind, getting a lot of players who could do the identity actions that would entail, along with some who were odd fits, but then getting a coach who understood the goal, understood the ideology of how they were supposed to get to the "score a goal, one more than them" point, but could not actually produce a process and a set of procedures at ice level that would take anyone there. Which is now obvious in hindsight.

I think that shows the danger of the strategy setter at one level having an imperfect understanding of how the goals can be achieved by the actors below him or even if it can. Treliving had one type of how they should play firmly in his mind, but not the hard part – the actual processes themselves. Affect and effect again.

Some of his choices hit the levels below him in ways that fractured the idea of who the team is and how and what they would do. The biggest example of this is his first player signing, Ryan Reaves. But there were more. Some of his player choices made the processes going on at team level more plausible, like Oliver Ekman-Larsson.

This comes right back to Justin Bourne's article of a few weeks ago where he said in frustration that it doesn't even matter what plan they have, they just have to pick one and then work to it. And this is the interesting thing about hockey, with its layers and layers and layers. You can actually have all sorts of different hows and whys and cultures and win the Cup. There is no one true way. But you do have to pick a direction that can lead to winning.

Rogers has a bigger set of ideas they grapple with than just who are the Leafs: How to be a successful business, make money, build a brand identity and make out like a bandit on the IPO. I think Rogers should be setting a highest level ideological strategy with that in mind. Basically, win, and don't be boring while you do it. So a little more than what Pelley has communicated so far.

Pelley then needs to refine that a little more and pick a boss who can win, not be boring, and also reflects some values that are appropriate for a team that is in Toronto which is in Canada in this day and age. Datacentric makes me happy, but it's not a very full picture. I want the team to be flashy and obviously soaked in money, but not trashy. They should be expensive, but not gauche, and serious but not dull. The best of everything, but not without humility. Tough but fair. A collective who values everyone, but elitist about it all at the same time. Capable of having fun without it being try-hard cringe.

If that sounds a little bit uptight, well it should be, this is Upper Canada. But much like John Tavares has all the time in the world for William Nylander, a team like that will too. And they'll also fight that guy if they need to. I'm not asking them to be all things to all people. Rather, the baseline should be serious and professional and focused on the team's success, but the affect can be a lot more flexible. And, frankly, the boss should care a whole lot less about affect and more about having a team that can and will do the things that lead to get a goal, one more than them, do it again tomorrow.

And then a coach. This imaginary head of hockey operations has to hire a coach. But by that point, if the colouring in of the vision, strategy and tactics at every level has been done right, the choice should be easier than you'd expect, maybe even obvious. Because the coach has to understand that his strategy can't just be his personal taste, it has to work, and the evidence has to exist for his processes to be the right ones. His performance has to stand up to real measuring and assessing.

You have to believe in something. Even if you're Rogers, you have to believe in more than just oligopolies and share prices. If you're the Leafs, you have to believe in more than "gosh we're rich." If you're the coach, you have to have more than an aphorism about work ethic.

The lesson of Treliving's tenure is that what you believe in has to be grounded in the reality of your people and what they can do and what that can accomplish. Not what you'd like them to be. Identity and culture cannot be imposed top-down and they aren't substitutes for what works.

Analysis