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Until last spring, the Maple Leafs had employed a director of sports science and performance since 2015. Dan Hamilton / Imagn Images
On the first day of June 2015, the Toronto Maple Leafs announced an unexpected hiring. Dr. Jeremy Bettle would become the team’s director of sports science and performance.
The Leafs, overseen by then-team president Brendan Shanahan, had no general manager at the time. The move was explained at the time by Kyle Dubas, one of two assistant GMs co-managing the team.
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“In hiring Dr. Bettle,” Dubas said in a statement released by the team, “our sole objective is to be able to have our players know that as a program, we are doing everything we can in all aspects to optimize their performance and maximize their potential as a hockey player, regardless of what stage of their career they’re at.”
The job would have Bettle integrate once-siloed departments including medical, strength and conditioning and rehabilitation under one umbrella of performance. He would provide a vision and strategy for promoting the health and wellness of players and play an impartial role on players’ return from injury.
In the 2015-16 season that followed, the Leafs lost the second-most man games in the league to injury, mostly on account of Stephane Robidas’ 73-game absence. The following season, Bettle’s second year in charge, the Leafs had the second-fewest man games lost to injury. A year later, the third-fewest in the NHL, and the year after that, the 2018-19 season, the second-fewest once more.
Following that season, in June 2019, Bettle left to join the Anaheim Ducks. He was replaced by Rich Rotenberg, who oversaw the Leafs’ performance department for the next six seasons.
Last summer, not long after Shanahan was dismissed as president, Rotenberg became the director of performance for Dubas’ Pittsburgh Penguins. The Leafs, the most valuable franchise in the NHL, did not replace him or Sachin Raina, who had the title of sports scientist and who also left to join the Penguins.
Injuries have been a major sore spot for the team this season. The relatively high age of the group and a compressed schedule due to the Olympics have both likely played a part in that. Injury levels are high across the league. Still, Bettle said he believes the decision to enter this season without a director of sports science has been a factor, too.
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“It’s gone back to being a traditional hockey club now,” Bettle said in a recent interview. “It’s back to how it was before I arrived. It’s like it never happened. It’s absolutely why they have more injuries.”
“You cannot have injury-free seasons the way they’re currently set up,” he continued. “And that’s no knock on anyone in particular — it just doesn’t work.”
The majority of NHL teams have some kind of performance director, a person tasked with overseeing the optimization of player performance.
The Leafs now lack anyone with such a title, though they currently employ Steven Hirsch as a sports science consultant. The team says it has also bolstered its medical and training staff in other ways this season, adding an additional assistant strength and conditioning coach, an assistant dietitian and a third assistant athletic therapist, as well as consultants in mental health and mental performance.
The Toronto Raptors, meanwhile, have employed Alex McKechnie as their vice-president of player health and performance since 2011. It was on the recommendation of McKechnie, a close friend, that Bettle came on the Leafs’ radar. Bettle was working as the Brooklyn Nets’ head of strength and conditioning and director of nutrition when an email landed in his inbox from Dubas.
Bettle — who has a PhD in human performance, a master’s in exercise science, and another degree in sport and exercise science — interviewed with the Leafs (still without a head coach or GM at that point) and was among the five finalists. The team then hired Mike Babcock as head coach and soon after, Bettle arrived in Toronto for yet another interview, this time with Babcock and Mark Hunter, the other assistant GM of the team; “two old-school hockey guys” he would have to win over.
“What are you gonna do about Phil Kessel?” Bettle remembers them asking him with a laugh about the winger who was traded to Pittsburgh soon after.
Lou Lamoriello became the GM later that summer.
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Bettle won the job and got to work building a program that would keep players as healthy as possible, not just reactively when injuries struck but also in preventing them if at all possible.
On the day the NHL schedule was announced each summer, Bettle and Babcock would sit down together and plan out the team’s practice schedule, with a sharp eye on sleep, travel, off-days — whatever was necessary to keep the group as fresh and healthy as possible over the long grind of 82 games.
It was a constant balancing act that required fine-tuning throughout — having players sit out practice, for instance, if the tracking data from the at-the-time new technology being used showed they were fatigued or at risk of injury.
“He never once overruled us,” Bettle said of Babcock. “If we said a guy couldn’t practise, if we said a guy wasn’t ready to return to play, if we said a guy shouldn’t play.”
Winning over both Lamoriello and Babcock was essential to the program’s success in the more traditional hockey climate.
The first “real test” came when Bettle noticed something in the tracking data, which showed Joffrey Lupul was straining one side of his groin over the other and then vice-versa.
Bettle recommended that Lupul sit out and rehab.
“That was the first time we had to proactively talk to Mike and be like, ‘Hey, something’s happening here,’” Bettle recalled. “And he’s like, ‘Well, we don’t know what that is.’”
Eventually he convinced Babcock that a blowup was coming if the team didn’t act (and indeed, Lupul, after playing in 46 games, would require season-ending — and ultimately career-ending — sports hernia surgery in February).
“We won the battle,” Bettle said. “But everybody got some scars from that.”
The players could lean on the performance staff as much or as little as they liked. Each had individual risk data. If something changed in that data, there was someone there to look into why that might be and what might be required to fix it, be it supplemental sessions with the strength coach or extra time on the table.
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“Obviously you can’t predict certain injuries before they come but you can kind of see where you’re weak and (determine) areas that need improvement,” Tyler Bozak told The Athletic for a profile of Bettle in 2017. “So you just kind of get stronger in those areas.”
In time, the Leafs became one of the healthiest teams in the league.
“We went three and a half years without having a non-contact injury there,” Bettle said, referring to the kind of injury that occurred absent contact with another player, puck or stick. “Which is unprecedented in professional sports.”
Not having someone in his old role, someone with the qualifications to lead the performance department, is a mistake in Bettle’s estimation.
“It’s almost human nature, but you’ve not got anybody to make a final decision who is impartial,” he said. “My role was to not be the strength coach or the physio. It was to listen to all the information and then make an informed decision.”
“Sometimes the strength coach was right. Sometimes the trainer was right,” continued Bettle, who hosts “The Vitality Collective Podcast” and is the executive director and co-founder of The Vitality Collective. “But if the strength coach thinks he’s right and the trainer thinks he’s right, those guys are going to butt heads. That’s it. It’s not going to be a ‘let’s talk about it and come out on the right side.’ It never does. And when the GM becomes what the performance director should be — he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have enough information.”
The Leafs have already lost nearly 200 man games to injury this season, eighth-most in the NHL, including prolonged absences to Chris Tanev, Brandon Carlo and Anthony Stolarz as well as the first spate of injuries in William Nylander’s career. They were 11th last season with Rotenberg still around, thanks largely to Calle Järnkrok (sports hernia surgery) and Jani Hakanpää (lingering knee injury), who missed over 100 games combined.
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“You need somebody with domain knowledge in that impartial position leading the department,” Bettle said. “You’ve got to know when the trainer’s right and when he’s wrong and when the strength coach is right and when he’s wrong. That’s something that the general manager is not equipped to do, or the coach.”
And while data was important, Bettle added, the job entailed an understanding of the team and culture and the importance of certain games (i.e. playoffs vs. regular season) in the cost/benefit analysis.
“My phrase to the staff was always, ‘We are a hockey club. We are not a sports science club,’” Bettle said. “We can prevent every single injury if we just stop them playing hockey. But that’s not really the point, is it?”
While limited in what they can spend on players under the salary cap, the Leafs can throw as much money as they like at team-boosting efforts off the ice — and have done so for many years.
Last March, however, Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, under the leadership of Keith Pelley, cut 80 jobs and later in the spring chose not to replace Shanahan as team president. Top Raptors executive Masai Ujiri was fired soon after.
“We will, just like in any other business, evaluate all facets of the organization in terms of how we utilize resources,” Pelley said in May. “We have all the resources here to be a championship team, but it’s using the resources in the right way.”
Ultimately, Bettle conceded, “you never know what’s going on inside a club.”
“I’m not blaming the staff,” he said. “I’m blaming the structure. It’s just not set up for them not to have injuries.”
Jonas Siegel is a staff writer on the Maple Leafs for The Athletic. Jonas previously covered the Leafs for TSN and AM 640. He was also the national hockey writer for the Canadian Press. Follow Jonas on Twitter @jonassiegel
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