Gavin McKenna spent part of this week in Yukon, and Toronto Maple Leafs general manager John Chayka made the trip with him.
A video posted Wednesday by Leafslatest shows the two of them building a fence together, quad bikes parked in the background, gas can in hand.
The caption calls it a Yukon experience. Fitting, since McKenna is exactly that this offseason, the biggest name the organization has handed a shovel in years.
This is Chayka's read on player development, apparently. Know where the kid comes from before you ever put him on a line chart.
It's a small gesture on its face. But for a franchise that just spent a brutal season bleeding games, image matters more than it used to.
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Toronto finished 32-36-14, good for 78 points and 28th overall in the league. They allowed 299 goals against, one of the worst marks in hockey.
The Leafs closed the year on a seven-game losing streak and went 2-7-1 over their final 10. That's the wreckage McKenna is stepping into.
A losing season makes the Yukon trip about more than optics
Split it further and it gets uglier. Toronto went 18-15-8 at home but a rough 14-21-6 on the road, the kind of gap that gets coaches fired in other buildings.
Their last game of the season was a 1-3 loss at Ottawa. Not exactly the tape you want your incoming franchise cornerstone reviewing on the flight home.
So does building a fence in the Yukon fix any of that? Of course not. But it's not supposed to.
What it does is put McKenna and his GM in a room, or a backyard, together before the noise of an NHL season ever starts. Call it a rebuild, if you want to be generous about the term.
Chayka clearly believes relationships get built before the cameras show up for training camp, not after. Whether that translates to wins is a different question entirely.
Right now, Toronto has a generational name attached to a losing operation, a GM playing the long game, and a fanbase that's watched this kind of promise before. What happens when the season actually starts is still anyone's guess.
Does John Chayka's personal touch with Gavin McKenna actually matter for the Maple Leafs' rebuild?
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