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Mike Gillis

Former Vancouver Canucks general manager Mike Gillis spoke about being pursued by the Toronto Maple Leafs, saying, “It wasn’t the right fit.”

Gillis was among the many past and present executives the Maple Leafs interviewed during their search for new management to lead the team in the future. In the end, the Maple Leafs hired former Arizona Coyotes general manager John Chayka as the team’s new GM, and they brought back franchise legend Mats Sundin to be the team’s senior advisor.

But the Leafs were heavily rumored to be talking to Gillis. So, what happened?

Mike Gillis Speaks

Talking to Sekeres & Price, Gillis confirmed that he was talking to the Maple Leafs about potentially joining the team in some capacity. However, he felt that ultimately it was not the right fit, and the team decided to go with Chayka and Sundin in its senior management roles, instead. Based on Gillis’ comments, it seems like he did not want the day-to-day GM job that Chayka took on, and instead, he wanted to be in a senior leadership role, providing guidance to a younger GM.

“Different pressures mount in these jobs that cause you to perhaps think not as clearly as you might want to. I think there’s a role for people to help guide younger managers in this space to maintain their integrity and their thought process, and maintain how they go about things, not listening to the pressure that’s going on outside,” Gillis said.

“The Toronto Maple Leafs weren’t going to fill that role. It became apparent. It wasn’t the right fit. A lot of the reporting around it wasn’t correct. It just wasn’t accurate.”

Miks Gillis Said He Had Different Plans for the Maple Leafs

When asked about what he was going to bring to the Leafs, Gillis said that he had given the team a plan that he wanted them to follow, but it appears that MLSE president and CEO Keith Pelley had different ideas, and the two sides just ultimately could not come to a consensus on Gillis’ potential role with the club.

“I laid out a plan for them that was pretty detailed around the types of people, the profiles that I would have liked to have seen in an organization, or any organization. If I did this, it’d be the profiles that I’d want to see. There’s a lot of short-term pain when you do these things. Letting people go is not the most pleasant thing, and there’s a cost associated with it. You have to ensure you can get the people that you want to get to get into those seats that you think are critical to a really high-functioning place,” Gillis said.

“The top-five teams are like that. They’re not perfect, but they are like that. They have the right analytics people, and they have the right hockey people, and they have a process. To me, teams that are struggling need that. They need someone to come in and say, “Here’s what you have to do with the different pieces of the puzzle. I laid that out for them, and it was early on, and they understood where I was coming from. So the continued reporting created this momentum, and it was really flattering, it was really nice. People said good things about what we did in Vancouver (with the Canucks) and other pieces of this. So it was nice to see. But it just wasn’t completely accurate.”