If you've paid even the slightest bit of attention in the last two years or so, you're fully aware of the controversy surrounding the Toronto Maple Leafs and their direction.

Under coach Randy Carlyle and general manager Dave Nonis, they tried to build success on the concept of toughness, more or less by itself, ever since Brian Burke was fired before the commencement of the 2013 lockout-shortened season. This continued Burke's work, in a way, because no one values “pugnacity” and “truculence” — fancified 50-cent words for stocking a roster with players that aren't even worth that much — more than him, but Nonis and Carlyle seemed intent to double down on the concept.

They have largely failed. Apart from the brief playoff appearance in that season, driven mainly by a run of unrepeatable luck and the fact that the campaign was 48 games long and not 82, the Leafs have been a disaster. Nonis and Carlyle swore by their process, but when it didn't produce, their bosses brought in some insurance.

Hiring Brendan Shanahan earlier in the offseason to be team president marked a big change for the organization that had previously stood by Nonis and Carlyle's decisions, no matter how questionable. Where before there was little accountability, it's already been made clear that the buck — of which the Leafs have more than any other NHL team — stops with Shanahan, effectively rendering Nonis an assistant GM who gets to put in his input just like everyone else, but doesn't have a ton of say beyond that. Like Greg Sherman in Colorado, he's apparently GM in name only.

This is an alarmingly shrewd move for a guy who's never been any kind of team executive before. Nonis may have had the confidence of Leafs upper management for a long time, but the failure to make the playoffs — or even come close — this past season seems to have been the last straw; there would be no one else to protect him from the slings and arrows hurled by pretty much everyone in the hockey media save for some of the more shameless sycophants in Toronto, who still need Nonis for a scoop, or might run into him at a family function.

Shanahan took the job as the Leafs were being shelled with criticism for sticking by their guns even as they'd long ago run out of bullets. The Leafs' system allowed them to be badly outpossessed and still be competitive, but it was a sham; and Nonis had really only succeeded in letting some of the team's best players walk — whether through simple unrestricted free agency or after being bought out — while “bolstering” his roster with guys like David Clarkson (who was hilariously overpaid the day he signed, before he played a single game of his disastrously unlucky 2013-14 season, from which he's almost certain to rebound) and not much else.

Leafs fans largely wanted blood, with even the fans who were most disinterested in the underlying statistics howling mad at the team's direction.

Shanahan promised changes would be made, and they came quickly and harshly. All of Carlyle's assistants were fired. Two assistant GMs went not long after that. It was unclear, however, what would come next. And that was Shanahan's real stroke of genius: He hired 28-year-old Kyle Dubas, previously general manager of the OHL's Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, to be an assistant GM.

Perhaps the most vocal critics of the Leafs' performance over the last few years was the dreaded and long-derided “advanced stats community,” who viewed the Leafs more or less as a living referendum on the efficacy of the believes they'd been espousing for years. About possession, about the usefulness of the enforcers Carlyle insisted on dressing every night, about zone entries and exits, and about forechecking schemes that maximize turnovers before the other team gets to the red line. All the data these people compiled basically said that the Leafs were always going to fail under Carlyle's “system,” and every time the Leafs lost — which was often — there were a lot of told-you-sos flying around. Every time they won, there followed a lot of yes-buts.

The thing fans need to keep in mind in sports isn't results, necessarily, but rather how those results are achieved. The Leafs having some of the worst possession numbers in the league for years indicated that any success they had would be fleeting unless something changed, but the results over about 70-some games across in the last two seasons (beginning Jan. 2013 and ending more or less in Dec. 2014) said different. When the Leafs inevitably collapsed under the weight of their own broken process, the calculator crew of advanced-stats evangelicals were able to told-you-so with renewed and never before seen vigor.

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