Jason Smith might have been the best (or worst) example.

Smith was a big, strapping defenceman acquired by the Leafs from New Jersey 18 years ago as part of the package for team captain Doug Gilmour. He played a little more than three seasons with the Leafs before he fell out of favour with the coaching staff headed by Pat Quinn.

They didn’t like the way he skated. Kind of hunched over. Wasn’t pleasing to the eye and ultimately, they thought, that would sentence Smith to a brief and/or mediocre career.

Not quite. Smith went to Edmonton, became that team’s captain, and played more than 700 more games in the NHL after leaving the Leafs.

For Smith, the Leafs got a second-round pick. They drafted Kris Vernarsky.

He played 17 NHL games. For Boston.

Leaf history, of course, is littered with these kinds of errors. The point of this example, however, is that it was specifically produced by a traditional approach that said the most important assets to a hockey executive were his eyes, his gut and his experience.

He didn’t need a file of data. He needed to trust his instincts.

If Quinn, or his assistant Rick Ley, didn’t like the way Smith skated, they undoubtedly had many examples in their rich hockey backgrounds that led them to believe that.

This was how the Leafs operated before Quinn and after him, and to be fair, how many (most?) teams operated. Toronto, however, was usually worse at it. That has meant they’ve been a franchise frequently immersed in the pursuit of folly.

Under Brendan Shanahan, the Leafs are trying to mend their ways and take a more logic-based approach to the business. It’s hard to see that as the final days of this smoking crater of a season wind down, but the idea is to build in more safeguards against mistakes while at the same time being open to new ideas and concepts.

Part of this is a new reliance on analytics, or fancy stats, as some like to call them. The belief that hockey can’t be boiled down to hard numbers has been largely disproved, and now the argument is more about how much those numbers can be relied upon.

For the Leafs and Shanahan, a decision has to be made on the future of GM Dave Nonis, and likely will as soon after the season ends. But we know Kyle Dubas, who very much believes in analytics, will be there, as will Mark Hunter, also a believer.

So the overall philosophy won’t change even if the GM does. This is a team now in pursuit of skill and speed and players who can think the game above all else. If skill comes in a bigger package — Dylan Strome, Noah Hanifan — great. If not, skill first, and the Leafs believe analytics can help them find the kind of players they want, and want to keep.

Which brings us to Jake Gardiner.

Gardiner is a 24-year-old defenceman who has played 242 NHL games, all for the Leafs. To his many critics, he is a soft, inconsistent rearguard who makes too many big mistakes that end up in the Leaf net. To those critics, he must go.

The hard numbers, however, may tell a different story.

Steven Burtch writes on hockey analytics for Sportsnet and the Hockey Prospectus, often in ways that cut against traditional thinking. He argues, using an advanced stat called dCA60, that Gardiner is actually a much better player than his critics allege.

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It’s a complicated statistic. Basically, you take a lot of variables, crunch them together, regress the expected outcomes and — voila! — out spits a value. In Gardiner’s case, Burtch says the numbers demonstrate that he’s actually an elite defenceman in terms of the impact he has on his team’s ability to possess the puck, generate offence and suppress the opposition attack.

“The quiet, reliable part of his game is what needs to be acknowledged,” says Burtch. “It’s the whole cognitive issue. Making decisions based on glaring examples of mistakes isn’t a good idea. People have this tendency to disproportionately weight things they can recall easily or recently.”

Burtch doesn’t work for the Leafs, but he offers a window on the kind of analysis that is almost certainly now going on in the Toronto hockey department under the Shanahan administration, not just of Gardiner but of the entire roster.

Does it mean Gardiner won’t be traded? No. But what is probably does mean is that if he is traded, it will be after a more rigorous evaluation that will involve the types of advanced statistical analysis of which people like Burtch and Rob Vollman of Hockey Abstract are noteworthy proponents.

Does it mean the Leafs won’t make any more big mistakes? No. Every team does. Ken Holland may be the best GM in the game, and he gave $25 million to Stephen Weiss.

But more of this deep analysis should improve Toronto’s odds when it comes to personnel decisions. It might have, for example, saved them from signing Clarkson when it seemed to many (myself included) that he was exactly the kind of hard-nosed, gritty performer the team needed.

The analytics people said it was a crazy signing. They were right.

This is a team committed to change, to making decisions at least as much based on cold, hard data as much as gut instinct and what somebody thinks their eyes are telling them.

The teardown is still on and the rebuild is yet to truly start. There’s no guarantee this will ultimately produce a winner. Shanahan may fail and eventually get fired.

But Leaf hockey decisions under this regime aren’t likely to be made impulsively, or because somebody got beat on the winning goal and is getting roasted on the FAN 590, or because somebody skates funny. Not any more.

Damien Cox is a broadcaster with Rogers Sportsnet and a regular contributor to Hockey Night in Canada. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for the Star, and his column appears here Saturdays. Follow him @DamoSpin.

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