Toronto Marlies Coaching Staff Set: Bourque to AGM, Moore Returns

The Toronto Marlies coaching staff is finally complete

The Toronto Marlies coaching staff and front office are set for 2026-27, and the last round of hires says more about how John Chayka intends to feed the Maple Leafs than any of the summer's depth signings did. Chris Bourque has been named assistant general manager. Denver Manderson and Greg Moore join Steve Sullivan's bench as assistant coaches. Maple Leafs assistant general manager Ryan Hardy continues to oversee hockey operations, working alongside assistant general managers Mike Dixon and Bourque.

On paper this is housekeeping — the sort of late-July announcement that gets a paragraph and disappears. It should not. Two of these three hires point directly at the single biggest structural change in North American player development, and the Leafs have now staffed for it more seriously than most NHL clubs have.

The full staff under Sullivan: assistant coaches Mark Giordano, Manderson and Moore, goaltending coach Hannu Toivonen and video coach Nick Biamonte.

Chris Bourque's real job is college recruitment

Bourque's title is assistant general manager of the Marlies. His actual mandate is broader — he also serves as the Maple Leafs' head of college recruitment, and that is the part worth paying attention to.

He is not a parachute hire. Bourque joined the organization in 2022 as a college free agent scout and has been doing this work inside the building for four years. His playing résumé is one of the best in modern American Hockey League history: 794 games, 746 points and three Calder Cup championships across a 13-year AHL career, most of it in Hershey. He knows exactly what the level demands, which matters when the job is convincing a 23-year-old with options that Toronto is the right first professional stop.

College free agency used to be a niche market — a few useful depth players a year, most of them overpriced by bidding wars. It is not niche anymore. Since major junior players became eligible for NCAA hockey, the college game has absorbed a large share of the sport's best under-20 talent, including Toronto's own first overall pick, who played his draft season at Penn State. That shift does two things at once: it makes college rosters deeper and more scouted than ever, and it means the undrafted or unsigned player leaving school at 22 or 23 is a materially better player than he used to be.

Making that a named, senior portfolio rather than a side duty is the kind of quiet organizational bet that shows up three years later as two cheap NHL regulars. It also fits the pattern of the rest of Chayka's summer, which we tracked through the Leafs' front office hires.

Greg Moore returns to a very different Marlies

Moore, 42, is back where he spent four seasons as head coach. He ran the Marlies from 2019 to 2023, going 107-91-8-6 and coaching the North Division at the 2023 AHL All-Star Classic, then left for three seasons with USA Hockey's National Team Development Program, where his teams medalled at the World Under-17 Hockey Challenge and the IIHF World Under-18 Championship.

He returns as an assistant, not the head coach, and that is not a demotion so much as a specific piece of casting. Moore's last three years were spent coaching 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds through the most volatile stretch of their development. The Marlies are about to be full of exactly those players.

That is the direct consequence of the new CBA's change to the 19-year-old rule, which finally lets NHL clubs assign a limited number of 19-year-olds to the AHL rather than shipping them back to junior. We laid out what that means for Toronto's pipeline in our breakdown of the new 19-year-old AHL rule. Hiring a coach whose most recent job was developing teenagers, in the first year a team can actually keep teenagers, is not an accident.

Denver Manderson and the development pipeline

Manderson, 37, is the internal promotion. A Fergus, Ontario native, he played more than 300 professional games across the AHL, ECHL and Finland's Mestis, and joined the Maple Leafs organization in 2017-18 after his playing career ended. He started as a team consultant, was promoted to development coach in 2023-24 working exclusively with the NHL club, and has also worked with the Guelph Storm and the University of Guelph.

Moving a development coach onto an AHL bench is a real change in job. Development work is one-on-one, off-cycle, and largely invisible; an assistant coach runs units, manages a room, and answers for results on a schedule. Organizations that do this well end up with coaches who know the prospects intimately and can hold them accountable at the same time. Organizations that do it badly end up with a friendly voice nobody listens to. Manderson's nine years inside the building suggest the former.

Steve Sullivan inherits a champion

Sullivan was named the ninth head coach in Marlies history on July 9. The 51-year-old Timmins native spent 2025-26 as an assistant with the Maple Leafs after two seasons on the Marlies staff, so he is not learning the organization on the job.

He is, however, following a title. John Gruden coached the Marlies to the 2026 Calder Cup — Toronto's first since 2018 — and was promoted to the Maple Leafs bench for his trouble. Sullivan takes over a group that just won, minus most of the reasons it won, because that is how a functioning AHL affiliate works: the good players leave.

Giordano's elevation to assistant coach rounds out a bench with an unusual amount of recent NHL experience for the level. For a room that will lean young, having a former NHL captain running the defence corps day to day is a meaningful advantage.

Why this matters to the Maple Leafs

The Leafs' roster problem this season is not talent at the top. It is the gap between the top and the bottom, and the cost of filling that gap with veterans on one-way contracts while sitting roughly $2.75 million over the ceiling. Every cheap internal answer the Marlies produce is worth more to this team than it would be to almost any other.

That is also the tension. Toronto spent the summer signing AHL and depth contracts that make the Marlies better and, in the short term, make it harder for the organization's own prospects to play — a trade-off we argued about at length in our piece on Toronto's blocked prospects. A staff built for development rather than for AHL wins is at least an acknowledgement that the organization knows the tension exists.

Bourque's college portfolio is the cleanest example of the point. If the Leafs cannot buy top-six help — and at their cap number they cannot — the alternatives are the draft and the free-agent markets nobody else is working hard. College free agency is the second of those.

What's next

The Marlies open camp shortly after the Maple Leafs, and the September rookie tournament in Gatineau is the first real look at the group Sullivan, Moore and Manderson will actually coach. Watch which 19-year-olds stay in Toronto rather than being returned to junior — that decision is the first practical test of whether the new staff was hired for the new rules.

For where the current pipeline stands, our player pages track the prospects most likely to make the jump this fall.