Kyle Dubas stood with his cell phone pressed to the glass.



The Maple Leafs general manager, with an unusual bit of theatre to start the workweek, was documenting the beginnings of the radical reordering of his team’s operation under his new head coach, Sheldon Keefe.



Promoted last week from the Toronto Marlies to replace the long-tenured but increasingly embattled Mike Babcock, Keefe wasn’t even on the ice at this particular moment, just after 11 a.m. on Monday morning. The Leafs weren’t scheduled to start actual practice until just before noon. Skill development was scheduled beforehand — first, for the defencemen — and it would be run not by Keefe, but Darryl Belfry, the team’s player development consultant.



And it took place not on the Leafs sheet of ice at their practice facility in Etobicoke, but on the Marlies pad — where Keefe coached for years — across the hall.



It all seemed like a pretty...