Everyone Is Already Mad At The New GM Of The Toronto Maple Leafs

In the media tumult (which is to say dungstorm, only less crassly) that followed the introduction of new Toronto Maple Leafs GM John Chayka, the tweet dinging him for naming his children after cheeses was neither the rudest nor the most substantive critique he faced. But it was meaningful all the same, if only as a general indicator of how this is all going to play. Yep, the kids are already in the mess, and all they did was have a birth certificate. And not only are they in the mess, their father has only been on the job for a day. Their school days are going to turbo-suck. That's how much the Toronto media cognoscenti in particular and the Canadian hockey media in general dislike Chayka's hire. They hate it in ways that only the fan psychosis micro-climates of New York and Philadelphia might be able to approach, and they have hated it so much that they have brushed right past the adjoined hire of Mats Sundin, perhaps the most popular living Leaf, as "senior executive adviser." That's a title for a job designed in part to serve as cover for Chayka and the man who hired him, and those are the two guys everyone else wants to be mad at. And why, you wonder? What has Chayka done to earn this tsunami of enmity? And more to the point, why did the Leafs hierarchy, specifically president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Keith Pelley, endanger an already questionable rep in town and with the company by swinging from his ass at this particular offering? Death wish? Pending WWE career as a corporate heel? Insightful real-world casting as an actual corporate heel?