Elliotte Friedman reveals head coach Maple Leafs nearly hired may be going to the Kings instead
Photo credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-Imagn Images
Elliotte Friedman revealed on the 32 Thoughts podcast that there was a moment Saturday morning when he believed Toronto was about to hire Laviolette.
Hours later, the read flipped entirely. Friedman now says Laviolette has a decent chance of becoming the next head coach of the Los Angeles Kings instead.
The reaction across the hockey world has been predictable. Toronto fumbled another hire. The coaching search is spiraling.
The Leafs are back to square one with three to five candidates and no clear frontrunner.
Re Patrick Roy/Peter Laviolette/Maple Leafs: "I know there were some people who wondered how legit their names were, I think they're legit."
- Elliotte Friedman
- Elliotte Friedman
That framing misses the most important detail sitting in plain sight. John Chayka spent his entire tenure in Arizona making unconventional coaching decisions driven by data and systems thinking.
He never gravitated toward the veteran retread model. Laviolette is exactly the kind of hire a traditional hockey market pressures a GM into making, not the kind a Chayka-led front office seeks out.
The snap-back tells you more than the near-miss
Something shifted in those few hours between Saturday morning and Friedman's next update.
The simplest explanation is that Chayka reasserted his own philosophy after being nudged toward a safe, experienced name by the weight of the Toronto market.
The fact that the search reopened to three to five candidates immediately afterward suggests this was not a collapse.
It was a correction.
Friedman's own reporting backs this up. On the same podcast episode, he revealed Joe Pavelski is going to get an interview for the Toronto job.
That is not the move of a front office scrambling after losing its top choice. That is a front office deliberately widening the aperture beyond traditional coaching resumes.
What the Kings hire would confirm
If Laviolette lands in Los Angeles under Ken Holland, it reunites two hockey minds who default to veteran authority.
Holland ran Edmonton with experienced bench bosses and aging core players for five years.
Laviolette fits that mold perfectly. Toronto deciding that mold does not fit them anymore is not a loss.
It is the first real signal that Chayka is building something different behind the bench, not just in the front office.
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