Article · 17 August 2026
No part is bigger than the whole.
The NHL has been building senior performance roles for years. In Europe, we still too often treat the work between the specialists as something somebody can do on top of their real job.
It wasn't just Toronto.
A week ago 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 not Toronto.
It was the job they 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.
Since then I have kept looking.
And I would change one thing from what I wrote.
This is not really something the NHL is starting to do.
Look around the league and versions of the role are already there.
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 are different.
The reporting lines are different.
And an org chart tells us very little about whether the people inside it are actually good at working 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.
The NHL has more money. That is not the whole answer.
The easy response in Europe is obvious.
Of course the NHL can do this.
They have bigger budgets.
Bigger staffs.
More technology.
More games.
More money tied up in every player.
All true.
And there are European clubs moving in the same direction. I have seen organisations 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 organises 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.
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.
Maybe sometimes it is.
Not every club needs another title.
Not every club needs another salary.
But then we should also be honest enough to price the alternative.
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?
And what does one unavailable player cost?
One game?
Five games?
A playoff series?
A couple of points that change where you finish?
I am not suggesting that hiring one senior performance person prevents injuries or buys points in the standings.
Sport is not that clean.
Good systems do not remove uncertainty.
But poor connections create uncertainty we do not need.
And that has a cost too.
The salary is visible. Fragmentation usually isn't.
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.
two points gone.
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 answer is not to put a performance director above everybody and tell the specialists what to do.
That would solve one problem by creating another.
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 all of those people to have an edge.
I want them to disagree.
If everyone sees the player in exactly the same way, we probably have too many people looking through the same window.
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.
That is the paradox.
You can have excellent people making excellent decisions and still produce a poor organisational decision.
Not because anyone lacks competence.
Because nobody has responsibility for what happens when the competent answers collide.
The player does not live in departments.
This is probably the simplest way I know to explain it.
We build departments because organisations 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 organisation 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 organisation 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.
A meeting does not own anything.
European clubs often answer this by saying that everyone meets.
Good.
They should.
But coordination is not the same as responsibility.
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.
And a meeting cannot carry responsibility on Friday night.
A person has to.
That does not mean one person makes every decision.
That would be ridiculous.
Sometimes the doctor leads.
Sometimes the physio does.
Sometimes performance needs to have the strongest voice.
Sometimes the player does.
And sometimes the competitive situation changes what we are prepared to accept.
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 judgement.
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 whole disappears because every part is urgent.
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 authority to close the difficult calls.
The name on the door is not the point.
But when I look at how several NHL organisations 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.
Shorter distances.
Fewer layers.
Faster conversations.
Clearer decisions.
But small organisations 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 owns the whole player in this club?
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 closes the call when medical, performance, coaching and the player do not agree?
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.
Maybe in time.
Maybe in staff frustration.
Maybe in a rehabilitation that loses direction.
Maybe in availability.
Maybe in development.
Maybe, occasionally, in points.
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 specialised, 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 organisations 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.
Where does the decision stop in your organisation?
If the joins are unclear, tell Magnus what you are seeing. A few lines are enough.