Maple Leafs draft lottery: nine weeks took the Leafs from a GM hire the league called a sham to the first overall pick and a $4.35 billion buyout.
Nine weeks ago the Toronto Maple Leafs were an organisation in visible trouble. They had finished 32-36-14, twenty-eighth in the league and last in their division, missing the playoffs for the first time since 2015-16. The general manager had been fired in March. The president’s contract had not been renewed the year before. Reporting had emerged that the chief executive of the parent company had turned up at the trade deadline carrying notes a language model appeared to have written.
On July 6, Rogers Communications agreed to pay CAD $4.35 billion for the remaining quarter of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. Across that transaction and the BCE purchase before it, the grossed-up value of the company rose thirty-nine percent.
What happened in between is the clearest demonstration available of how this organisation actually works, and it took about seventy-two hours.
May 4: nineteen of twenty
On Sunday May 3 the Leafs announced John Chayka as general manager and Mats Sundin as senior executive advisor of hockey operations. Chayka had been the youngest GM in NHL history when Arizona hired him at twenty-six in 2016. He left the Coyotes in 2020 immediately before the season resumed in the Edmonton bubble, was later suspended for conduct detrimental to the league after seeking work elsewhere while still employed, and had presided over a period in which Arizona forfeited draft picks in connection with a private scouting combine. He had not worked in the NHL since.
At the introductory press conference the following day, Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun told Keith Pelley he had spent three or four days contacting around twenty people who work in the league, many of them prominent names. One had supported the hire. The other nineteen had called it a sham, and the words they used were con artist, liar and salesman. Simmons asked how the organisation had reached a different conclusion than he had in a very short time.
Pelley said he must have talked to different people. Simmons asked whether that was really the answer, and said the hockey world was astounded. Pelley said the due diligence had been deep, the process thorough, and that he was quite happy with where they had landed. Asked separately whether Chayka or Sundin outranked the other in hockey operations, he did not give a clear answer. Asked whether the club would hire a new president, he did not commit.
Sundin — thirteen seasons, a statue outside the building — received almost no attention at his own introduction. The exchange travelled well past Toronto; American sports television ran segments on it.
May 5: seven, two, eleven, twelve
The next evening, at the NHL Network studios in Secaucus, four ping-pong balls came out in the order seven, two, eleven, twelve, and the Toronto Maple Leafs won the draft lottery.
They had held the fifth-best odds at 8.5 percent. Vancouver, who had finished fourteen points behind everyone else, fell to third. Toronto became the third club in six lotteries to win without the best odds. It was their third first overall selection, after Matthews in 2016 and Wendel Clark in 1985.
There was a second benefit that had nothing to do with the prospect. By staying inside the top five, Toronto triggered the protection clause on the first-round pick it had sent Boston in the Brandon Carlo trade, retrieving an asset it would otherwise have surrendered. Finishing twenty-eighth had a payout attached, and the payout arrived twice.
The reset, performed on schedule
Within a day the Steve Dangle Podcast had published a live reaction stream to the lottery and a separate instant-analysis video. The description SDPN wrote for the second one says it covers the win, who Toronto might take, and why this changes everything for the Maple Leafs moving forward.
Twenty-four hours earlier, nineteen of twenty people working in the National Hockey League had described this organisation’s most significant decision of the year as a sham. Now everything had changed.
This is the mechanism described here in April, running in real time and faster than usual. The bubble does not burst once and stay burst. It deflates and reinflates on a cycle, and each reinflation needs a supply of new anticipation to run on. Ordinarily the club has to manufacture that itself, through a signing or a coaching change or a plausible summer plan. This time the league provided it for free, four days after the worst press conference the organisation had held in years.
None of the questions Simmons raised were answered. They were simply superseded. Gavin McKenna went first overall in Buffalo on June 26, a Penn State freshman with fifty-one points in thirty-five games, and SDPN published an instant analysis of that too.
July 6: what it was all worth
Six weeks after the draft, Rogers agreed to buy Kilmer Sports’ twenty-five percent of MLSE for CAD $4.35 billion, expected to close in the fourth quarter, giving it full ownership of the Leafs, the Raptors and Toronto FC on top of the Blue Jays, Rogers Centre and Sportsnet.
Sportico’s valuations put the Toronto portfolio at roughly $13.1 billion: Raptors at $5.22 billion, Leafs at $4.25 billion, Blue Jays at $2.9 billion, Toronto FC at $730 million. Chief executive Tony Staffieri had told the company’s April earnings call that the consolidated sports assets were worth more than CAD $25 billion, and Rogers has said it intends to sell a minority stake over the coming year and use the money to pay down debt.
Staffieri has been consistent about the reasoning. He told Sportico the thesis was to consolidate the assets and surface that value for Rogers shareholders. That is the stated purpose of owning the Toronto Maple Leafs, given by the man whose company now owns all of them.
Nothing that happened was a setback
Run the nine weeks back and look at what each event cost the business. Missing the playoffs produced lottery odds. The lottery produced a franchise prospect and recovered a first-round pick from Boston. A contested general manager hire produced two days of coverage and then stopped mattering. A press conference in which the league’s own executives were quoted calling the club a sham produced content for podcasts on two continents.
And at the end of it, the parent company paid a thirty-nine percent premium to own the rest of it outright, while valuing the whole portfolio above twenty-five billion dollars and preparing to sell a slice of that to investors.
Supporters spent this spring being told that the season was a disaster and then, four days later, that everything had changed. Both statements were made in good faith by people who follow this team closely, and neither of them describes what actually happened, which is that a hockey club finished twenty-eighth and its owners got richer. The team is the thing that failed. It is not the thing being sold.