There are going to be a lot of rumours and things said about why Burke was let go. Since the news we heard that it had to do with Luongo, where some people said people within the Leafs organization wanted him and Burke didn’t OR Burke wanted him and others didn’t. I know for a fact that some fans were concerned that he was more concerned about his extracurricular activities than the Toronto Maple Leafs. As well, it has also been said that the new owners just don’t like him as a personality. The latter is what is gaining momentum mainly because it was only Burke that was fired and no one else in the front office.
While those two things may have been the straw the broke the camel’s back, let’s not fool ourselves. There are two main reasons why Burke is no longer the President and General Manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
1. He Rushed the Job
When Burke came in here, the team and fan base were in desperate straits. John Ferguson Jr. was getting mercilessly destroyed in the media for the moves he made. The management appeared to give him the ultimatum “Make the Playoffs or Else”, where JFJ sacrificed the future in order to do so (see Raycroft, Perreault, Blake, etc). The team was swimming in circles, not making the playoffs, while not getting good lottery selections in the draft to improve the team. Once JFJ was fired, Burke instantly became known as the savior of the team, long before he even got here.
At the time Burke took the job in Toronto, the perception was that he had all the time in the world to get the job done. Due to the circus that surrounded the “search” for a GM, he was able to dictate the terms of his arrival in which he got a 6 year deal and appeared to have full autonomy of the club. That offseason, his staff went out and got players like Komisarek, Beauchemin, Orr, and Armstrong. Adding those players to a team that played well near the end of that season, many thought the additions made them a playoff team. Burke apparently said so himself. On yesterday’s Prime Time Sports on The FAN 590, Bob McCown said he had lunch with Burke at the time where Burke said, “If I don’t do anything else I believe we are a playoff team no matter what.”
This is where things hit the fan in this regard. A draft choice for every team is considered a “safety net”. If things do not work out during a season, at the very least that team would get a high draft choice to help balance things out for the upcoming years. The Phil Kessel deal has been talked about to death. We all know it didn’t turn out well for the Leafs, despite what Burke has said in the past about it. At the time NO ONE expected the Leafs to truly be that bad, including myself. My problem with the deal was, and has always been the fact that Burke put too much faith in a team that had not played together. With the signings in the offseason, it meant that there had been significant turnover within the team. It always takes time for a team to gel and to see if it works or not. By the end of the year, the Leafs had also traded Blake and Toskala for Guigere, and the Dion Phaneuf trade took place. After which it could be safe to say that at least 3 quarters of the team was different from the year before. Without that flexibility to see how the team would adjust to this, the team floundered and also lost two top 10 choices (2 and 9) in the next two years.
After this, Burke did go back to the building slowly through the draft approach. By this time it was too late. The message sent to the market in Toronto with the Kessel trade was that he was expecting to win now, which means the market expects it as well. There would be no patience after that because the market has seen what could have happened if patience was preached from the beginning.
2. Burke Backed Himself into a Corner with his Media Comments
Burke is known for always saying what he believes in. That’s something I really admire in him. However the finality of his statements caused him to be limited in what he could do to improve the team.
Burke had taken a strong stance on the trends of contracts being signed throughout the league. The Luongo contract and the Kovalchuck contract, where they were signed long term with a significant drop off in salary at the end of the contract, was something he said the Leafs would never do with him in charge as he viewed it as cap circumvention. The problem was that under the old CBA, those contracts were perfectly legal in the NHL’s eyes. So due to those principles, Burke had essentially eliminated himself and the Maple Leafs from signing any of the top tier unrestricted free agents.
I understood the thought process behind it. First of all, Burke never said he wouldn’t do any long term deals. He said he wouldn’t do the back diving contracts where it would circumvent the salary cap. So deals where the cap hit were the same throughout the contract he was more than happy to consider. Secondly and more importantly, there was no reason to sign a player to a truly long term deal when you don’t know what the CBA was going to look like past 2011. We found out just how important it was to have cap space going into a potential lockout in 2005. After the yearlong work stoppage, the Leafs were incapable of improving their team in a free agency class that included two years’ worth of players. He wanted the Leafs to be flexible in that situation.
The problem here is the same problem as earlier, due to the fact that he rushed expectations of winning, the fan base and ownership were not willing to wait for this to occur. All the market could see was that there were players being signed to contracts that could have really helped the Toronto Maple Leafs in the present. It got to a point with Burke that he couldn’t do certain moves due to what he had said 2 or 3 years earlier. That’s not good from a fan point of view, or if you are trying to negotiate a contract or a trade with another NHL executive, they already know your hand.
I do have other qualms with Burkie during his time with the Maple Leafs, but those qualms just come with being a fan. You aren’t going to like everything your GM does or say. My example would be that Mr. Burke said once that you don’t need 3 or 4 star players to win a Stanley Cup. My thought process was “Hold on a second let’s look at every team since the lockout”. Only Carolina you could argue didn’t have 3 or 4 star guys when they won, and that was a year where the salary cap was just introduced AND the new “Shanny” rules.
To be honest, I don’t like the firing as a Leaf fan. In fact, I’d go as far to say that as a Leaf fan I’m embarrassed by the way this was handled. I don’t buy for a second that they only finished their analysis of the team now and that’s why the timing is what it is. Burke was doing the leg work for the organization so that the CBA would be as “Leaf Friendly” as much as possible. I would suspect that the other board members did not want to be the guys to do that. So once Burke did his job there, the board got their way and he was gone.
As I mentioned in the comments for Michael Augello’s article, if they had to fire him, I wish it would have been much sooner so a guy like John Davidson could have been pursued by the Leafs instead of the Columbus Blue Jackets.
My two role models in the hockey industry are Brian Burke and Don Cherry. Both say what they’re thinking and don’t apologize for standing up for what they believe in. It’s something I admire. Burke’s time in Toronto had been marred with so much misery both personally and professionally, to which I don’t even wish upon my enemies. I hope once the initial shock wears off that there is a bit of relief for him before he gets back out there in the hockey world.
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