The hierarchy of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment – CEO Richard Peddie and chairman Larry Tanenbaum – have been under an almost constant stream of criticism over their handling of the storied Leafs franchise. Their hiring of John Ferguson Jr. as general manager in 2003 started yet another slide in Leaf fortunes on the ice. In an excerpt from the book Leafs AbomiNation: The Dismayed Fan's Handbook to Why the Leafs Stink and How They Can Rise Again, authors Dave Feschuk and Michael Grange look at some of the Leafs' problems in that era, as seen through the experiences of the club's former player personnel director:

For all the public outcry, there were problems behind the scenes that didn't get much attention. One was the short tenure of Craig Button, who'd been a candidate for general manager's job before John Ferguson Jr. was hired and who was eventually hired by Ferguson as the team's director of player personnel.

Button knew something of Ferguson's situation. In 2000, at age 37, he'd been named the general manager of the Calgary Flames, where he spent most of three seasons presiding over a decline in the club's fortunes. The Flames never made the playoffs on his watch, and he was roundly criticized for leaving the roster in a shambles.

Still, Button's credentials before he became a GM were impressive. He'd been the director of scouting and was promoted to the director of player personnel for the Dallas Stars during a successful string of seasons that culminated in the Stars' 1999 Stanley Cup on a goal Sabres fans are still calling for the league to review because Brett Hull's skate was in the crease.

And Button, like Ferguson, is the son of an NHL father. Jack Button was the general manager of the Pittsburgh Penguins for a time in the 1970s, and he was assistant general manager of the Washington Capitals for most of two decades until he died in 1996.

During his time in Toronto, Button, who spent 2008-09 as a commentator with the NHL Network, saw more than just a lack of managerial fortitude and foresight. He saw a huge company and sporting institution that thought small. And he saw Ferguson constantly bowing to the pressure to come up with short-term solutions to long-term problems.

"When John came in, it was interesting. He talked about, `We've got to build this with draft picks and with youth.' He was hired in August of '03. And at the trade deadline of '04, first-round draft picks were flying out the door," Button says. "But that's Toronto. There's different pressures that exist. And I think they exist whether your name is Ken Dryden or Pat Quinn or Cliff Fletcher or John Ferguson. And it'll apply to Brian Burke. I believe the key part of it is you can't get caught up in the immediacy. What happens when you get caught up in the immediacy is that you don't see the forest for the trees. Therefore, a trade of a third overall pick for Tom Kurvers occurs."

The Kurvers trade, of course, wasn't a Ferguson stroke. It happened on the watch of Floyd Smith, who dispatched what turned out to be the third-overall selection in the 1991 draft to the New Jersey Devils in a move to shore up Toronto's defence. The Devils used the pick to select Scott Niedermayer, who'd go on to anchor three Stanley Cup winners. Kurvers was traded to the Vancouver Canucks for Brian Bradley, who would go on to score 42 goals in an NHL season, albeit for the Tampa Bay Lightning, who got him for nothing when the Leafs left him unprotected in the 1992 expansion draft.

"Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment has massive resources, which is a good thing. I've seen a real lack of foresight in the use of those resources to really gain a competitive advantage. Personnel, scouting procedures, processes, development, all those things," Button says. "I couldn't fathom how pennywise and pound-foolish they were. I mean, if development and recruiting are going to be key parts of your operation – and they need to be – well, I'll tell you what, you blanket the earth. You use your resources. If you can't spend some of your resources on player acquisition (because of the salary cap), you spend it on developing players. You make sure you're as sharp as anything. In my time there, I thought that was severely lacking."

Ferguson, sitting high above the ice at Hamilton's minor-league rink, making meticulous notes on the action below, glances up at the press-box video monitor. It's showing a Leafs game, and Ferguson begins a rumination on the current state of his former employer.

"Clearly the organization now, whether it's through capitulation, whatever else, is clearly on board. The manager has a six-year deal. The coach has a four-year deal," he says with the touch of admiring envy you might expect from a man who never enjoyed that kind of long-term job security. Ferguson can't resist a playful jab at Burke's build-it-from-the-basement philosophy.

"When you're not trying to win," he says, "it's hard to underachieve."

Even when the Ferguson regime was on the verge of getting it right, they sometimes got it wrong. Consider the case of Fabian Brunnstrom, the Swedish forward with whom the Leafs shared a strange off- ice dance. Brunnstrom signed with the Dallas Stars in 2007, and he played regularly with the big club with modest results that saw him spend some time in the minors during the 2008-09 campaign. But the Swede's eventual fate as a pro isn't particularly vital to this anecdote. What's important to understand is that, in the fall of 2007, Brunnstrom's name was a veritable buzzword everywhere from hockey message boards to NHL executive offices. What made him so attractive? He was a classic late bloomer who hadn't been drafted by an NHL club, which made him an unrestricted free agent. And so, at age 22, he was suddenly among the most talked-about players in Sweden's elite league.

NHL scouts had seen this kind of phenomenon before and largely ignored it, which allowed the Ottawa Senators to draft an unheralded Swede named Daniel Alfredsson with the 133rd overall pick in the 1994 draft, a move that turned out to lay a key piece of the foundation for a Senators team that became, for a while, a perennial contender with Alfredsson as captain.

The frustrating thing for various members of the Ferguson scouting staff in Toronto was that, while most of the league was fawning over Brunnstrom by November of 2007, the Leafs had tracked him down long before. Toronto, for all of the criticisms that have been levelled at its scouting department over the years, had made a key investment in bird-dogging in the 1990s, when they signed Swedish scout Thommie Bergman to be their director of European scouting.

Bergman was a pioneering player in the 1970s as the first Swedish defenceman to play in the NHL, a title often erroneously given to Borje Salming of the Leafs. And Bergman, in his post-playing career, had carved out a reputation as a man with a keen eye for talent.

When Bergman saw Brunnstrom playing for Boras of HockeyAllsvenskan, Sweden's second-best league, he knew the kid was bound for bigger things. Convinced of Brunnstrom's talent, the scout finally summoned Button to Europe to see for himself. And as they continued to watch the prospect – at one point buying tickets to a game (rather than alerting other scouts to their presence by requesting a pass) and sitting among the fans wearing big coats and hats so as not to be recognized – Button soon agreed with Bergman that Brunnstrom had NHL potential. The developmental plan, which seemed to make sense to Brunnstrom's camp and to Bergman, would be to sign the player to a contract and have him play the 2007-08 season in the Swedish Elite League. He would play for Farjestad, a respected club where he would be coached by Hakan Loob, a Swede who'd earned a Stanley Cup ring with the Calgary Flames in 1989 and a man who knows what it takes to make the jump to the NHL.

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"It was a no-brainer," says Button, looking back. "I mean, here was a free agent you can sign for next to nothing? It's a no-brainer."

But when Bergman brought the plan to Ferguson and the GM's lieutenant, Mike Penny, the no-brainer became a flat-out no.

"Mike Penny, with John Ferguson right there, said, `There's no f--king way we're f--king signing a guy and having him play in f--king Sweden. What the f--k is this bullshit?'" says Button. "I'm sitting there thinking, `Okay. Don't listen to me. That's okay. But you hired this guy, Thommie Bergman, and this is his job, to find talent in Europe, and this is how he gets treated?' But that's exactly what was said."

That's not the way Ferguson remembers the conversation. But he doesn't deny that, months later, when Brunnstrom was still unsigned and playing for Farjestad, the Leafs were among the teams suddenly expressing interest in his services. By that point, though, Brunnstrom's camp was said to be aware of the initial rebuff by the Leafs' higher-ups. And sure enough, just as Brunnstrom gave Toronto a pass, Button wasn't long for the Leafs.

Button called the Brunnstrom affair "one of the straws that breaks the camel's back." But there were others. He didn't agree with the club's decision to move the American Hockey League club from St. John's, Nfld., to Toronto's Ricoh Coliseum.

"I think it's the dumbest thing they ever could have done. Putting [prospects] under the scrutiny of Toronto? I can't think of anything dumber. How do you live in a city like Toronto when you're a young player making $50,000 a year? But that was a business-side decision. They thought they were going to make a ton of money off the Marlies. They thought they'd make something like $3 million or $4 million a year. And they're losing $3 million or $4 million a year. So they were off by $6 or $8 million."

Above all, perhaps, Button didn't feel he was making a contribution. Perhaps because Ferguson was afraid of involving anyone who could be seen as a threat to his power in the decision-making process – and Button, a former NHL GM, could certainly have qualified as a threat – Button says his suggestions fell on unreceptive ears.

"A big reason I left is there's got to be a fit. When you don't feel you're contributing, when you don't feel anybody's paying attention even, it's difficult to stick around," says Button. "I cannot begin to tell you how non-communicative John Ferguson and Mike Penny were. I'm talking, not even, `Good idea.'

"You'd send stuff to them – nothing. Somebody asked me once, `What's John like in private?' I said, `Exactly like he is in public.' And I'm not trying to rip on John. I think he was overwhelmed. I think he was like a deer in the headlights and he didn't know what to do. But again, was that John's fault? Or was that Richard Peddie's fault? To me, Richard Peddie deserves all the blame for putting that person in that spot."

Excerpted from Leafs AbomiNation: The Dismayed Fan's Handbook to Why the Leafs Stink and How They Can Rise Again. Copyright 2009 by Dave Feschuk and Michael Grange. Published by Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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