It wasn't just Toronto.
In The parts are there. The seat is not., I wrote about the Toronto Maple Leafs creating a performance structure with a Vice President of Sport Performance and a Director of Health and Performance Integration.
What interested me was the job Toronto had decided needed to exist.
Strength and conditioning, sport science, nutrition, rehabilitation and mental performance were not being treated as five separate answers. Somebody had been given responsibility for making them work around the same player. Toronto's announcement made that unusually explicit.
Looking around the league since then has changed one part of my argument. This is not something the NHL is only starting to do. Versions of the role already exist.
The Rangers now list Matt Price as Director, Sports Performance, alongside a Manager of Performance Data Science, Head Strength & Conditioning Coach, assistant strength coaches, sports nutrition and athletic training. Price arrived from Los Angeles, where he had been Director of Sports Science.
Dallas has a Director of Sports Performance and Sports Science and a separate Head Strength and Conditioning Coach. Calgary has a Director of Sports Performance alongside its medical and therapy staff. Florida has a Vice President of Sports Performance as well as a Director of Sports Performance and Rehabilitation. Ottawa has a Director of Player Health and Performance.
The titles and reporting lines differ, and an org chart tells us little about how well people work together. But the idea is no longer unusual.
The specialists remain specialists. Somebody is increasingly being asked to see what happens between them.
That is the part I think we should be paying attention to.
Official club sources: Toronto · New York Rangers · Dallas · Calgary · Florida · Ottawa.
The NHL has more money. That is not the whole answer.
The obvious response in Europe is that NHL clubs can afford it. They have bigger budgets and staffs, more technology, more games and more money tied up in each player. Those are real differences.
And there are European clubs moving in the same direction. I have seen organizations beginning to take the connection between medical, performance, rehabilitation and development much more seriously.
But I also still see the other version.
We already have a physio.
We already have a strength coach.
The doctor is good.
The coaches talk to them.
The sporting director is involved.
Why would we need another person?
So instead we add a little more responsibility to everybody.
The physio takes some of the return-to-play coordination.
The strength coach keeps an eye on the monitoring.
The head coach makes the final call when opinions differ.
The sporting director looks at the longer development picture when he has time.
Someone organizes the meetings.
Someone sends the reports.
Everybody contributes.
On paper, the work is covered.
The problem is that covered is not the same as owned.
And when the season gets busy, the difference becomes very clear.
Extra work is cheap until it becomes expensive.
I understand the economic argument. A senior person costs money, and that salary appears in the budget immediately.
If you already have capable people in the building, asking them to carry a little more can look like the sensible decision.
Sometimes that may be the right choice. Not every club needs another position, but we should also examine the cost of leaving the responsibility with already busy staff.
What does it cost when a return-to-play decision takes longer because nobody owns the full progression?
What does it cost when rehabilitation is moving one way and performance preparation another?
What does it cost when the player hears one thing from medical, another from strength and conditioning and something different again from the coach?
What does it cost when a senior specialist spends several hours every week coordinating everybody else instead of doing the work you hired that person to do?
What does it cost when an important decision arrives on the head coach's desk with four accurate opinions and no agreed way to weigh them?
An unavailable player also limits the coach’s options, whether for one game or a playoff series.
Hiring a senior performance lead cannot guarantee fewer injuries or more points. But clear responsibilities can help us avoid delays, duplicated work and decisions made without information that was already available.
The salary is visible. The cost of disconnected work is harder to see.
Nobody receives an invoice at the end of the month saying:
three different plans for the same player.
return-to-play decision delayed.
work duplicated between departments.
important information reached the coach too late.
player unavailable.
Those costs disappear into the season.
That does not make them free.
No part is bigger than the whole.
This is where I want to be careful. The role needs authority to lead the shared work, with respect for each specialist’s professional responsibility. Medical decisions remain with the responsible clinicians.
A good doctor should be a doctor.
A good physio should defend what they see.
A strength coach should have strong views about what the player needs physically.
A sport scientist should bring information the rest of us cannot see.
A nutritionist should notice what the training week is costing the player.
A coach should care very deeply about winning tomorrow night.
I want those specialists to have strong views and feel able to disagree. Their different perspectives are part of what makes the staff valuable.
But no one of those views is the whole player.
No part is bigger than the whole.
The problem begins when the parts start behaving as if they are.
Medical makes a medical decision.
Performance makes a performance decision.
Coaching makes a hockey decision.
Development makes a development decision.
Each one can be completely defensible.
And the player can still end up in the middle of four different plans.
Individually sound decisions can still conflict. Someone needs to recognize that and help the staff agree on a plan.
The player does not live in departments.
This is probably the simplest way I know to explain it.
We build departments because organizations need structure.
The player does not care about our structure.
His groin does not know which budget the physio sits under.
His nervous system does not care who runs sport science.
His fatigue does not stop when the strength session ends.
The game tomorrow does not separate physical readiness from confidence, pain, sleep, role, workload and the coach's need to win.
There is one player.
But inside many clubs we still divide that player into pieces because that makes the organization easier to manage.
Then we ask the player to put himself back together.
That was one of the reasons I wrote the first article.
A player can only follow one plan.
If the organization gives him several, he eventually chooses.
Sometimes he chooses the person he trusts most.
Sometimes the person with the strongest title.
Sometimes the answer he wanted to hear in the first place.
None of those is a performance system.
Someone has to follow up after the meeting.
Clubs often point to their staff meetings. Those conversations matter, but the responsibilities need to be clear after the meeting too.
The meeting can put the information on the table.
It cannot guarantee what happens after the meeting.
Six people can leave the same room with six slightly different versions of what was decided.
When an issue comes up before a game, someone has to make sure it is addressed. That does not mean one person makes every decision.
Sometimes the doctor leads.
Sometimes the physio does.
Sometimes performance needs to have the strongest voice.
Sometimes the player does.
The game situation may affect the options we discuss. It does not override medical restrictions.
The senior person's job is not to be the smartest specialist in every discipline.
It is to understand enough of the whole picture to know which specialist should lead this decision, for this player, at this moment — and what everyone else now has to support.
That is judgment.
It is also why bolting this responsibility onto somebody else's full-time role worries me.
It works when the week is quiet.
Then February arrives.
Games come every second night.
Two players are returning from injury.
Another has been playing through something for three weeks.
A young player needs development work.
The head coach wants answers.
The medical room is full.
Suddenly the person who was also supposed to connect the system has their actual job to do.
Guess which job wins.
The one that has to be done today.
The coordination gets postponed because everyone has urgent work to do.
This may be where Europe still has ground to make up.
Not everywhere.
And not because North America automatically does things better.
It doesn't.
A title proves nothing.
You can appoint a Director of Sports Performance and still have territorial departments, bad communication and poor decisions.
You can also have a small European staff with no impressive titles that works brilliantly because the people trust each other, the responsibilities are clear and somebody has the responsibility to make sure difficult decisions are resolved.
The name on the door is not the point.
But when I look at how several NHL organizations are structuring these functions, I think they have at least become more explicit about something we still too often leave informal.
Somebody has to own the whole.
That is different from doing all the work.
And I think this distinction matters particularly for smaller clubs.
If you only have six people around performance and player health, you cannot afford for three of them to unknowingly work in different directions.
If you cannot buy every technology or hire every specialist, the people you do have need to become more valuable together.
That should be an advantage of being smaller.
With fewer layers and closer contact, a small staff can share information and resolve questions quickly.
But small organizations only get that advantage if somebody makes the connections deliberate.
Otherwise being small simply means everyone has three jobs.
Maybe the expensive option is the one that looks free.
That is the question I would put on the table.
Not:
Should we hire a Performance Director?
That starts with the solution.
Start somewhere else.
Who is responsible for bringing each player’s plan together?
Who decides what our physical development should produce on the ice?
Who makes sure rehabilitation becomes performance again rather than simply ending when the player is medically cleared?
Who sees whether what we test is actually changing what we train?
Who connects the first team with the players still developing underneath it?
Who has the authority to say that two individually good plans are pulling the same player in different directions?
Who makes sure concerns are resolved by the people responsible for the decision?
And most importantly:
Is that actually somebody's job?
Or is it something four people are expected to remember while doing their own?
If there is a clear answer, good.
You may not need another seat.
If there isn't, I would be careful about calling the current solution economical.
Because eventually the club pays for the missing work somewhere.
The cost may show up in staff time, frustration, rehab that loses direction or player development that stalls.
The difficult thing is that you rarely know which one it was.
The parts were never the problem.
That is probably where I have landed after looking at this again.
The NHL did not suddenly discover strength and conditioning.
It did not discover sport science, physiotherapy, nutrition or rehabilitation.
Those parts were already there.
What seems more established now is the recognition that as the parts become more specialized, the responsibility for the whole has to become more deliberate too.
Toronto has made that very visible. New York has just rebuilt part of its performance structure around a Director of Sports Performance and distinct performance-data, strength and nutrition functions. Other NHL organizations have had their own versions of senior sports-performance or player-health leadership for years.
Europe does not need to copy the titles.
We do not need NHL-sized departments.
We probably do not need more hierarchy.
But I think more clubs need to decide whether the connections between their good people are important enough to be somebody's first responsibility rather than everybody's extra one.
Because no part is bigger than the whole.
But the whole still needs an owner.
