from Damien Cox of The Spin,

In Toronto, Brendan Shanahan was brought in as team president, and he's getting a feel for the organization. GM Dave Nonis is trying to get his head around how and why the team collapsed down the stretch and surrendered such horrific shots-against numbers while doing so.

Nonis needs to understand what role Carlyle played in that, and then he'll have to justify his decision to Shanahan.

In Washington, owner Ted Leonsis is probably enjoying the basketball success of his Wizards for a few days and taking his time on figuring out how it all went wrong with his hockey team.

The futures of Oates and GM George McPhee are both up in the air. That, of course, ignores the real issue in D.C., which is the future of the team as long as Alex Ovechkin is the centre piece, both with his massive contract and unwillingness to do much else than put up prodigious goal totals.

You can change the GM and coach. But the bigger question is whether you can ever get anywhere with Alexander the Great.

Finally, in Vancouver there were two moves in the final days of the season, the firing of GM Mike Gillis and the hiring of Trevor Linden as president of hockey ops. Like Shanahan, Linden is sorting through the paperwork, and at this point seems to have decided to focus on hiring a GM, and then letting that person decide Tortorella's future.

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