BIG UPDATE:

The Leafs have announced Brian Burke will become a Senior Advisor to the club with no direct authority over Hockey Operations. Dave Nonis will become the permanent GM and VP immediately.

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According to TSN's insider Bob McKenzie, the Toronto Maple Leafs have fired Brian Burke as the General Manager of the club. As of writing, I haven't seen anything suggesting that he has been let go as the President of the Leafs but I would assume that he is out in both roles. I assume that Bob McKenzie then walked over to Darren Dreger's desk, dropped his BlackBerry, and walked off into the sunset. Greg Brady also mentioned that a source that he trusts implicitly said that Randy Carlyle is by no means safe so this could be the beginning of a huge restructuring of the Leafs' management.

The timing of this announcement is, in keeping with Toronto traditions, completely insane. Rogers and Bell completed their purchase of MLSE on at the end of August and presumably were not sitting around on their hands during the lockout. They've now left the team in disarray with ten days before the season opener against Montreal. The more things change...

While the timing is nonsensical, the logic behind the move is up to debate. MF37 had a post outlining why he thought Burke was lucky to have had the lockout buy him some time since he has been a huge disappointment since being hired by the Leafs. We'll delve into his record in more detail in the coming days but "the bad outweighed the good" basically sums it up.

Dave Nonis will be the interim fulltime GM and Senior VP of Hockey Operations and already the word from Kypreos is that the Leafs are still in the running for Luongo. His first move as Canucks GM was famously to trade for Luongo from the Panthers. It could be a case that Burke was simply unable or unwilling to make a trade for Luongo and the new ownership, desperate to avoid missing out on the playoffs yet again, asked whether Nonis would do all he could to get the deal done.

Most of you probably don't follow TFC but yesterday they fired their coach, Paul Mariner, and then hired someone that is still currently a player in the English Premier League that may miss the first few months of the season and will be entrusting the management of the team to an assistant coach. So if you think that things can't get any weirder, hold on to your butts.