More photos » by H. Rumph, Jr. - AP

Browse more photos »

I've actually been planning on doing this for a couple weeks — after reading this book on vacation — but it seems pretty well-timed with all that's going on in Toronto right now. 

It's possible you've already heard about the book given it's a bestseller here in Canada and the promotional side of things is in full swing, but for the uninitiated, it's called Leafs AbomiNation: The dismayed fan's handbook to why the Leafs stink and how they can rise again and it's written by two respected local sportswriters, Dave Feschuk from the Toronto Star and my colleague, Mike Grange, from The Globe and Mail.

And while the packaging may look a bit jokey with the fan in a paper bag mask and the $19.67 price, this is a serious book with some nice investigative work and in-depth coverage of just why the Leafs are where they are. It's a smarter book than it looks. Feschuk and Grange do things like go on a scouting trip with former general manager John Ferguson, meet with some of the pension plan suits (who own a majority share in the team) to get their perspective on turning a profit on the franchise, and talk to some disgruntled former employees like Craig Button who reveal some of the dysfunction in the organization (and why the Leafs missed out on Fabian Brunnstrom).

If you're interested in the mess that is the Leafs, it's good stuff, and that more than anything is why I wanted to pick Mike's brain on the book a bit more. What follows is a (somewhat lengthy) conversation we had a couple days ago about Leafs AbomiNation:

What was the genesis for the book? What was it that made you and Dave decide to do this topic?

MG: It was him who suggested that there could be a book along these lines. We were kicking around a couple of other ideas, and he wanted to know what I thought of that one, and I thought it was pretty good. And I think I was able to bring something to it just being a citizen of this city sort of thing — I've covered [Leafs owners] MLSE, mainly through the Raptors, for a long time, and have some insights there that I thought would help the book out.

But the short answer is that I think it is just time [for a book like this]. You've got this incredible cultural force that people just can't stop talking or thinking about and yet the rewards are kind of sparse by most standards. And it was interesting to dig behind that a little bit.

As a neutral observer, it has been bizarre the last five years because the story with the Leafs hasn't so much been what's happened on the ice — that hasn't been that interesting or exciting other than 'they're bad' — the story's been these sort of machinations of a pension plan and the effect that's had on ownership and how the team is run. It's really a unique situation in pro sports, or at least certainly in hockey.

MG: What really jumps out at me — and a lot of it is even after we've written the book, you keep talking about it and thinking about it — is that in a way, it's a combination of two forces. Entertainment generally has become a much more significant consumer product than it was even 20 years ago, and sports as entertainment — well, it's officially entertainment. There always was that, but now it really is marketed and sold and commodified just as you would movies or anything else. And I think that trend is really accelerated in Toronto. You've got the explosion of sports media, the 24-hour sports universe, and that combined with an ownership group, the majority of which, maybe all of which with the exception of Larry Tanenbaum, is solely devoted to the return on investment. That [ROI] is the absolute guiding force for the [Ontario] Teachers' Pension Plan in this investment.

And so I think for Leafs fans, you get caught up in this cultural sort of shift where the team you grew up loving and following through thick and thin has really become a brand in the truest sense and they're owned by a company that is really only interested in — although they can say otherwise — what kind of return can they get for this brand. The fans in a way are a little bit complicit, but they're also sort of sucked up in this vortex — and what are you going to do, you're a fan? You don't really have a choice but to keep following this team you've grown up with and now you find yourself watching a bad hockey team and spending gazillions of dollars to do it.

And reading stories about pension plans and — you know, on that theme, it's interesting, the best Leafs blog out there is named after the pension plan.

MG: It is kind of amazing how well versed the average Leafs fan has become to the sort of twists and turns of a corporate entity. I think that's one of the things we wanted to cover for sure was to try and get behind and go beyond the surface understanding of some of these competing forces and I hope we did it.

You ask, why do a book like this, I mean, until Leafs AbomiNation came out, it was all kind of piecemeal — the columns on [MLSE CEO] Richard Peddie, or the talk show and sports radio takes on the pension plan — but until we sat down with the book and really kind of put some thought into it and peeled back some of the layers, it wasn't there in one package for people who both hate the Leafs and love the Leafs [to analyze].

It's 10 essays on a theme of "Why the Leafs suck."

That's actually what I was going to ask you — when I first saw the book and the topic, I was thinking, I've read these stories, I know Peddie, I've read the mini-profiles over the past couple years, I know Larry Tanenbaum, etc. But what the book does is, instead of piecemeal, instead of reading a 700- or 800-word story in The Globe or the Star or whatever on these topics, you've got either yourself or Dave actually in Peddie's office looking at his marketing awards and a whole chapter on this individual and his role. What it is is just a lot more depth on these issues — it gives you a much more well-rounded understanding than you can get in just a magazine or newspaper article and that's what I really liked about the book.

MG: Coming from someone like yourself, that's high praise. Let's face it, this team is not a team that most people follow casually, so it's hard to be original in the coverage. It's not like we invented all this stuff. People who have covered this team... they do a good job. There's a lot of material out there. Our goal was to kind of find the best of that and go a bit further.

[Mike and I talked here about some of the stories and interviews they were able to get in the book, but I'm going to skip ahead a bit for brevity's sake.]

Did you come away with a bit of a different perspective or did you sort of find what you thought you would?

MG: I would say more the latter. We definitely had a slant, and that's what kind of makes it a provocative book. I think if you were trying to write a book about why the Leafs are good, you could do that, too — it's just not going to be that interesting to a lot of people automatically.

What was interesting to me was, when you really laid it all out, we realized how the franchise has never got lucky. The other thing is, and we try and make the case using an owner like Mike Illitch in Detroit or Ted Leonsis with the Capitals — this is definitely a takeaway for me from the book which is there really is a benefit to having this single-minded, laser-focused owner. As long as they're well capitalized, they can really move the needle a little bit.

With the pension plan, it was just interesting to get behind them and see the history of it. They've never got lucky. As much as with other clubs you can point to as examples of how to do things right — Ted Leonsis made a brilliant decision to sort of tear down the Capitals, tank it and draft, but he got lucky to draft Ovechkin. And the Pittsburgh Penguins, they're another example where the best way to get really good is to be terrible, but the only reason they were so terrible is that their ownership was imploding.

In a way, what's happened in Toronto is they haven't been bad enough and the ownership hasn't been negligent enough or had the foresight to really put themselves in a position to get lucky.

You talk about tanking and that's really become the sort of in vogue way of thinking of building a winning NHL team, but really, the only reason it's working so well in Pittsburgh and Washington is that perhaps three of the best players of this generation were all picked within two years with Malkin and Crosby and Ovechkin. That doesn't always happen — guys like Chris Phillips and Patrik Stefan were first overall picks, so if you tank and that's the year you bottom out...

MG: No, and you're absolutely right, there's no guarantee. I guess to clarify, one thing that I would want to say to Leafs fans is, well, if I was a Leafs fan, what I would want to see is someone with the dedication to building a generationally great team. Now that is an incredibly tall order. To build a team like they had in the '60s... to build a team that is worthy of keeping the legacy alive and if you're a fan now in your 40s you can introduce the team to your kids who are nine years old. It's a high-risk proposition, there's no guarantee, but if you don't try it, it's not going to happen.

Because this fanbase is so dedicated and so loyal and all these things, I just think they deserve a bit better than a low-risk, low-reward approach.... In the last five or 10 years, think of decisions that were made that have absolutely set this franchise back. The first to me would be trying to remain competitive out of the lockout — that was an absolutely terrible decision. You're trying to squeeze, I don't know what, revenue, one last chance at glory? I don't know what out of an ageing group coming out of the lockout. By not being quick off the draw like Leonsis was in Washington, you set your franchise back five years and who knows when you're going to recover?

Similarly last year, finally you've created this kind of expectation that we are going to rebuild, we are going to start over, and yet they drafted seventh. Brian Burke gets up and says it's a sad day that we didn't make the playoffs, this whole kind of blustery theatre at the end of the season — but to me, why didn't you try and grab the third pick? Why didn't you try and get as bad as you could? Who knows what happens, maybe you get a [Victor] Hedman? Maybe you get a Tavares? You had a chance to get on that path.

From what I've seen so far, Hedman looks fantastic, too...

MG: Instead, I think if you're a Leafs fan, I think you've got to be kind of concerned. Not just because you're winless so far, but because... what are you? You've got a bunch of journeymen defencemen, you've got no scoring up front and there's still this expectation you're going to make the playoffs I guess by trading away your first two picks for a guy like Phil Kessel. I guess this would be the year you finish eighth or ninth because you're not doing anything for yourself in the draft anyway.

I just don't see the commitment to really try and be something special for the fanbase here.

When you talk about Peddie and Tanenbaum and even the guys with the pension plan, what really will probably enlighten Leafs fans most from the book is the fact that these are excellent businessmen. These guys have been very, very successful, and the team is just not part of their success so far. Would you agree with that?

MG: I would agree but with one proviso: If you're Richard Peddie or the Teachers' Pension Plan, the team has been a brilliant success. People forget, and we touched on this in a chapter called Life as a Leaf about the Gilmour era in '92 to '94, about how it was still a mom and pop organization. It was a small business, a small company — you could walk off the street and into Maple Leaf Gardens and watch practice, basically. And that's exactly when the pension plan got involved.

So if you're Peddie and the pension plan and you look at what the company was about in 1994 and what it's about in 2009-10, it is an incredible success. It's gone from a $100-million hockey team in an ageing, decrepit building to a $1.6-billion company that churns out $100-million in profit a year and is diversified across a number of sports and a number of entertainment spheres — including real estate.

It's a stunning business success.

[Mike adds here that he thinks it won't be a true success for minority partner Larry Tanenbaum until there's a championship and that his gaining a majority share in the team would be a good step forward for the franchise.]

And you think the pension plan is going to step out at some point?

MG: I do. I think there's going to be a scenario where — I talked to one NHL governor from a rival team that sort of paints a scenario where there is going to be expansion, one of the teams is going to be in Southern Ontario and not in Hamilton — because that would destabilize Buffalo — but probably somewhere in northern Toronto, a suburban team with lots of parking spaces, and that would mean say $300-million, $10-million a team [in expansion revenue] and a big, big cheque that goes to the pension plan. And that, to me, would seem to be a good opportunity to exit.

I think long term, they've done fabulously well with this investment and there's probably another opportunity out there that has a little bit more growth. And that's when you're going to see Tanenbaum take a majority position.

Our conversation was way, way longer than that, and perhaps at some point I'll get into more of it, but what I'll say is that I'll recommend the book as a way of getting into more of these issues. For some reason, they seem exceptionally relevant right now.