With the noise of the Toronto Maple Leafs wanting to hire John Chayka as general manager growing by the day, many are wondering what the 36-year-old would bring to the table.
To help us out, Sportsnet's Real Kyper & Bourne hosted on Thursday a man who knows Chayka better than most.
Steve Peters, who now works for ESPN, is a former video coach of the Arizona Coyotes.
Peters worked under Chayka when the latter became the youngest GM in NHL history with the Coyotes in 2016 at 26 years old.
What stood out to Peters about Chayka from their time working together?
"With John, you're getting a really smart guy," Peters said. "John doesn't have the success he had at 25, 26 years old if he's not a smart guy.
"He knows how to say the right things to people, he reads, he studies, he learns from people who have succeeded in things he wants to do ... so I think you're bringing in a smart guy that's going to try and bring that intelligence inside the hockey room back in Toronto."
Chayka has been out of the NHL since he resigned from the Coyotes in 2020. He was then suspended from the NHL for the 2021 calendar year after pursuing job opportunities with other teams without permission from Arizona.
Now, five years later, he could be headed to the Maple Leafs to help lead a team coming off its first missed playoffs in a decade and facing urgency with only two years left on captain Auston Matthews' contract.
Sportsnet's Elliotte Friedman reported on Wednesday's edition of 32 Thoughts: The Podcast that the Maple Leafs are working toward installing a duo of Mats Sundin as vice president of hockey operations alongside Chayka as GM.
And Peters thinks that having a more experienced staff around him in Toronto than he did in Arizona will be key to Chayka's success this time around, should he be hired.
"In Toronto, he's got people that have been there before," Peters said. "And Mats Sundin is a great example. This is somebody that gives John Chayka a little more cachet, and, OK, he's going to have someone to help him through this.
"I think John was probably just a little bit ahead of his time when he came to Arizona."
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