Frank Seravalli

That's the part no one really understands.

And now to add in the Matt Sundin element to it, it just feels like, A, this was cooked from the beginning, that this is exactly what Keith Pelley was going to do and Neil Glassberg was just a prop.

And B, that...

Well, Matt Sundin was brought in to dress it all up and make what was a very unpopular hire at least a little bit less criticized.

And that didn't work either.

Well, that's the part that I posed this morning with the reporting that I did that I

the NHL looked into a concern that was voiced by a team over the last few days of alleged tampering.

And some of the replies that I got from people were, so wait, the league found this claim to be unsubstantiated, yet you're reporting on it anyway, or are you just trying to sewer John Chayka and the Leafs?

And no, first off, anytime the league is looking into something like that, I think it's newsworthy.

Like the league, Gary Bettman and Bill Daley aren't in the business of wasting their time.

So if there wasn't something credible to it, they wouldn't have bothered looking into it at all.

And B, I think it speaks to the current that John Chayka is going to have to swim against in order to be –

an effective dealmaker with his counterparts in the NHL.

This underlines the suspicion that the people that he has to work with view him with as he resurfaces and enters the league again.

It's not easy to burn bridges like that and then come back in and say, oh, yeah, by the way, I'm going to call you next week and let's make a trade.

That's just not how it works.

Yeah, I mean, look...

I agree wholeheartedly with the thought process, and we'll have to see how that works.

But, I mean, there are other people that were involved in this process that got the ick and didn't have a good feeling about it.

There are others that were offered significant advising roles, and once they found out that it was John Chayka and Matt Sundin decided that it wasn't a fit for them,