TORONTO -- The job title has changed, but not his actual office.

Here on the 15th floor of the Toronto Maple Leafs offices Thursday, Dave Nonis still sits at the same desk in the same office despite the promotion to GM eight days ago.

It's not clear whether he'll make the move down the hall to the corner office, where the GM usually sits.

"I don't know, might just stay where I am, I'm fine here," Nonis said as he sat down for an interview with ESPN.com.

Besides, he adds, why waste half a day moving his stuff down the hall when there's so much work to be done?

He hit the ground running last Wednesday after being apprised of the stunning news. His friend and mentor Brian Burke was being fired as GM, and Nonis was taking over.

For some right-hand men, that would have been an overwhelming challenge right before a season was about to start. But Nonis was not your average right-hand man, he was a quasi-GM under Burke, a very senior hockey man with lots of responsibility in the day-to-day operation.

And so the GM duties in the Toronto operation weren't all new to him.

"It's not a lot different but it's more of it," said Nonis, whose deal was tweaked to reflect a new job description, while his term remains this season plus three more years. "We had split a lot of the work up. Brian had delegated a lot of things to me. Obviously, now that I'm in the position myself, there's more to do. But it's not unfamiliar."

He's already got a trade under his belt, moving center Matthew Lombardi, 30, to Phoenix on Wednesday night for a conditional fourth-round pick, and then making the difficult decision to place center Tim Connolly, 31, on waivers Thursday. One can easily surmise from both those moves that it's about making room for youth.

"Yes," said Nonis. "At some point they have to be given an opportunity to sink or swim if they've earned that opportunity. Our farm team has performed to a high level for close to two years now. A lot of those players are young players. If they play better than some of the veterans, even for a short time, they have to be given an opportunity."

The question is, has the plan changed now with Nonis at the helm?

"The destination hasn't changed, but maybe the road to get there has altered somewhat," said Nonis.

"I'm not going to give up youth for older players," he added. "We would trade a young player for a young player. We might trade from strength. But we're not going to trade a bunch of young players or first-round picks for short-term gain. You can't build a club that way. There's a point in time where you're good enough and deep enough where you can look at doing some of those things -- we're not there. And if we start to do that, we're going to end up being severely hampered in the development process of our club."

Just the mention of first-round picks is still a sensitive subject in these parts after Boston got a pair of them (which became Tyler Seguin and Dougie Hamilton) from Burke in exchange for Phil Kessel. Mind you, Kessel has been a consistent producer since arriving and his performance certainly can't be questioned.

But Nonis is saying he is indeed going to go about this a bit differently. He's not going to sacrifice the future for a short-term gain. And that's been the biggest mistake of nearly every GM who's ever sat in his chair, the lure of ending the 45-year Stanley Cup drought so difficult to ignore that Toronto's managerial history is littered with short-term thinking.

To Burke's credit, he left the Leafs much deeper in terms of organizational depth.

Nonis wants to continue to add to that depth and build through youth. He points to his days as GM in Vancouver as an example.

"We made a decision at a certain point there, too, that we had to get younger and bring certain youth into the lineup," he said. "A lot of those players that we started to look at are still playing there. You have to give those players a chance to develop and grow.

"It's not a one-year shot. It's a long-term process where the team can be competitive for a certain number of years, and the most successful teams in this league have done that."