When looking for blame most fans, understandably, start at ice level. They want a culture change in the room. They want a response when moments demand one. They want alignment between a coach and his best players. They want accountability — and they got at least a dose of it when general manager Brad Treliving was fired late last month.

But if this market thinks the story ends with a GM change, it’s missing the point.

Keith Pelley didn’t just fire a GM. He told you what the organization thinks it lacks.

At his availability following Treliving’s dismissal, the MLSE CEO didn’t lean on the usual “we thank him for his service” template. He talked about alignment, culture and structure. He also made clear that some decisions are big enough that they don’t stop at hockey ops. “Something as big as (the future of head coach) Craig Berube would go all the way to ownership,” Pelley said.

That’s not a scandal. That’s a hierarchy. And it brings us to the most important question in Toronto sports right now: Who is actually in charge of the Leafs?

If you want to understand where this is going, don’t start at Scotiabank Arena or the Ford Performance Centre. Start with the quarterly calls at Rogers Communications.

Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri told analysts the company’s sports and media assets have “a value in excess of $15 billion,” said that value is “not currently reflected in our share price,” and added that Rogers is “well positioned to surface this significant unrecognized value” over time.

Then came the language that matters for governance. Staffieri told analysts Rogers intends to complete a “sports monetization transaction” after purchasing the remaining 25 per cent minority interest in MLSE, owner of the Maple Leafs, Raptors, Argonauts and Toronto FC. Rogers already consolidated control by buying Bell’s 37.5 per cent stake in MLSE for $4.7 billion, taking its ownership to 75 per cent. The remaining 25 per cent of the $12.5-billion company sits with Larry Tanenbaum’s Kilmer Sports. While no official date is publicly known, speculation is that it ties closely with Tanenbaum’s birthday this coming July.

And Rogers CFO Glenn Brandt described the post-buyout road map in plain corporate English: combining operations, then “talking with potential investors and approaching the market.”

They didn’t say IPO. They didn’t announce partners. But “approaching the market” and “potential investors” aren’t throwaway phrases. They’re signals. They tell you the structure around these assets is expected to evolve.

What it doesn’t necessarily tell you is that control changes hands. Even in a hypothetical IPO or outside-investor world, it’s entirely possible for one dominant player to retain control through voting power and governance design, just as Rogers, which owns the Toronto Blue Jays outside of its MLSE stable, effectively does today.

But when the parent company is publicly telegraphing that kind of structural evolution, it raises the stakes on the most basic Leafs question: who holds final authority when the org chart gets redrawn?

Pelley was hired at a time when MLSE still had a multi-owner structure that demanded consensus-building and careful internal navigation.

If the ownership model shifts to one dominant voice, Pelley’s job becomes both simpler and more precarious — simpler because fewer stakeholders means fewer competing agendas; more precarious because in a one-owner world the flagship property’s failures land harder on the person running the company, whether or not he makes hockey decisions day-to-day.

And now, with Treliving gone, Pelley is about to make the most important hire of his tenure. He framed it that way himself.

Which leads to the line that should be written on the wall in every boardroom at MLSE: Edward Rogers may own the team, but ownership isn’t the same thing as leadership structure.

The Leafs, valued at $4.4 billion (U.S.) last year according to Forbes and the crown jewel of MLSE, don’t need another scapegoat. They need clarity: a defined chain of command where everyone in the building knows who holds final authority and where that authority sits.

Rogers deserves credit for largely letting his sports people operate without day-to-day interference. The issue isn’t meddling; it’s making sure the right person is empowered to make the ultimate call and that the accountability for that call can’t be blurred when it goes sideways.

The expected departure of Tanenbaum, for the people who have lived the MLSE job, is not just a balance-sheet event. It’s a governance event.

Richard Peddie, the former MLSE CEO, says it was “always imagined” contractually that Tanenbaum, who’s currently serving as chair emeritus at MLSE and chair of the NBA board of governors, would leave at some point. But the consequence is bigger than the transaction.

“What they are losing with their credibility and voice at the league levels is extreme,” Peddie said, pointing to Tanenbaum’s standing across leagues and his long history at board of governors meetings. “It was clear that the people in the room that had the credibility were the ones that had been there a while, had learned through success and failure, but also had sweat in the game.”

Peddie also said Tanenbaum’s influence inside the building mattered in a way fans rarely see.

“He was hugely regarded and liked by the 800 people that worked at that time,” Peddie said. “They all knew him. Larry knew a lot of their names. He was friendly to them … One of them just sent me a note saying, look, when I got promoted, what Larry sent me. And this was a note that, it went back 15 years and he kept it.”

Peddie said Tanenbaum’s leadership style wasn’t just about warmth. “He liked big ideas. He liked discipline and strategic thinking,” Peddie said. “He accepted buying a football team, soccer team for $10 million with no questions. We got into television, no questions. He really appreciated that strategic discipline.”

Peddie’s bigger point is the one that cuts to the heart of the current Leafs conversation: MLSE is not a simple job.

“That engine is very complex,” he said. “Multiple suites, multiple season-ticket holders, multiple sponsors. It’s a more complex game. When you add four other teams to it, holy cow.”

Toronto will spend the next month obsessing over the next hockey hire. That’s natural. But the more consequential story is the structure above it: the post-Kilmer entity, and who sits at the top of that pyramid.

Three scenarios stand out because each creates real accountability:

• Scenario one: Mark Shapiro runs the consolidated sports entity.

This is the clean CEO model.

The current Blue Jays president and CEO becomes the CEO of a unified Rogers sports organization. Pelley is out. Under Shapiro, you have sport-specific pillars with clear accountability and real authority: general manager Bobby Webster running the Raptors, fellow GM Ross Atkins running the Blue Jays, a new head of hockey operations for the Leafs, plus the leaders of TFC and the Argonauts, all reporting into one structure. 

One chain of command. One scoreboard. No fog.

It’s not about Shapiro being a hockey person. It’s about having one executive who can run a multi-team, multi-venue, media-adjacent portfolio at scale. And in a moment where Rogers is publicly discussing “sports monetization,” “approaching the market,” and “potential investors,” the appeal of a centralized model becomes obvious.

While clearly having a baseball pedigree, if you take a step back, Shapiro has quietly pulled off something in Toronto that is hard to do in any market, let alone this one. He got Rogers to spend real money on infrastructure, then turned that spend into a business case that actually makes sense.

In Dunedin, the Blue Jays and their public partners rebuilt the entire spring training and player development operation into a world-class setup, a project that has been described as a roughly $102-million (U.S.) overhaul that included a major stadium renovation and an expanded player development complex. And back home, the Rogers Centre transformation has been a privately funded, multi-phase renovation now widely pegged at about $400 million (CDN), converting a cavernous multipurpose relic into a baseball-first venue built to generate premium revenue every night, with new clubs, social spaces, and a lower bowl that finally feels like it belongs in 2026, not 1989.

Peddie’s caution is worth hearing. Shapiro may be at the top of his game, but running a single team is one thing. Running the entire machine is another.

• Scenario two: Pelley stays as CEO, with true heads of sport beneath him.

This is the tightened MLSE model.

Pelley remains at the top of the enterprise, but the change is what sits directly underneath him: a real sports leadership table with defined authority. Webster owns basketball. Atkins owns baseball. The Leafs hire a true head of hockey operations who owns hockey. TFC and the Argos have leaders with real mandates.

The point isn’t meetings. The point is that decisions have owners, and those owners have accountability.

In this structure, Pelley is the integrator across teams, venues, and media strategy. But it still requires one more thing: clarity about who blesses the biggest hires and how much autonomy each sport leader truly has when the stakes rise. Pelley himself acknowledged that some decisions go all the way up.

Peddie, who lived in that seat, described what the CEO role should look like when it’s done properly.

“I’m not going to make your decision,” he said, describing how he’d challenge his GMs. “But walk me through how you made your decision. I just want to make sure that the discipline is there and the strategy is there.”

• Scenario three: An outside sports czar comes in to run the whole thing.

This is the clean-break model.

Rogers brings in an experienced executive from outside the current ecosystem, someone with commissioner-style credibility across leagues, teams, venues, and media. Someone hired specifically to lead a consolidated enterprise, not someone who inherited it.

Under this structure, team leaders report into that person: Webster, Atkins, a new Leafs hockey chief, plus TFC and Argos leadership. Pelley’s role either becomes redefined around business and venues, or it shrinks, depending on how aggressive the reset is.

The appeal is simple. One accountable decision-maker installed above the teams, with a mandate to align the portfolio and end the ambiguity that has allowed failure to be explained away as “complicated.”

And if Rogers is serious about talking to potential investors, there’s a strong argument that the person running that enterprise should be selected with that exact future in mind.

Peddie’s view of what that person needs is blunt.

“They have to have the courage, truth to power,” he said. “They can’t be a wimp.”

The Maple Leafs fired their GM — that will satisfy the part of the market that always wants movement — but the move also forces the larger question out into the open. Not just who runs Leafs hockey, but who ultimately runs the entity that Leafs hockey sits inside.

Because Rogers isn’t talking like a company planning to keep the structure static once it resolves the remaining MLSE interest. It’s talking like a company preparing to unlock value, reshape the portfolio and bring in outside capital.

So yes, the Leafs have begun the search for their next hockey leader. But what they need to figure out is who’s actually in charge.