Leafs in chaos mode, plus Wemby's playoff takeover moment

The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning. Win life’s lottery today. Inside: 🍁 Toronto’s wild week 🚀 Wemby’s playoff takeover 🧠 The science of weird rituals Pucks: A shocking GM hire and a twist of fateThe Maple Leafs didn’t make the ongoing Stanley Cup Playoffs. But for two vastly different reasons, they were hockey’s biggest story this week. John Chayka was once the youngest general manager in major professional sports, a 26-year-old hired to run the Arizona Coyotes in 2016. It did not go well: Chayka was a rocky manager who reportedly treated the franchise’s all-time best player poorly. He resigned from the Coyotes (who have since moved to Utah) in 2020, and the NHL later suspended him for holding unsanctioned workouts for prospects while he was in Phoenix. Chayka appeared to be persona non grata. Now 36, he hasn’t worked for an NHL team in six years. Until this week, anyway, when the biggest brand in hockey made him GM. The Leafs hired Chayka to the utter shock of most of the hockey world, including reporters who covered him in Arizona. “I thought he might be blackballed,” one of them told The Athletic’s James Mirtle. A painful Monday news conference yielded mostly boilerplate answers from the team’s ownership group. “That this was the best (ownership) could do for a jewel of an NHL franchise, with a loyal and passionate fan base desperate to see a Stanley Cup victory for the first time in six decades, really is hard to believe,” writes Leafs beat reporter Jonas Siegel. Now, the chaser: The day after introducing Chayka, the Leafs won the draft lottery, giving them the right to (probably) take prized Penn State winger Gavin McKenna in June. Remember when the Mavericks traded Luka Dončić, drew the scorn of the entire sports world and then won the lottery to land...