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For the past three or four years, the Toronto Maple Leafs have lacked leadership in the locker room, new head coach Ron Wilson says.

Could he be talking about captain Mats Sundin, who hasn't yet decided whether he will continue to play? Or outgoing veterans Bryan McCabe and Darcy Tucker?

“We've got to go in a new direction,” Wilson said Thursday after working as the honorary draw master for the $1-million Woodbine Mile horse race. “We've got to look for different people on the team to shine.”

In other words, he said, the team has to get younger and the torch has to be passed. He doesn't know who the new leaders will be, until he sees what they do on the ice, in training camp, in exhibition games and for the first couple of months of the season.

“Where was the leadership the last three years?” Wilson said. “You can answer that question any way you want, whether it's the captains or the other veteran leaders. If we're missing that now, and we had it before, what the heck was wrong with the team the last three years?”

Wilson, who has fond memories of profiting from uncashed tickets at the Fort Erie racetrack as a child, said it would be easier for him to pick the winners of three races at Woodbine Thursday than to predict the future of Sundin.

He said the presence of Sundin in Toronto Thursday for a charity event was “almost irrelevant” to him because it doesn't appear Sundin will appear at the start of training camp.

He doesn't plan to talk to Sundin. “I'm not going to try and influence Mats one way or the other,” he said. “He's a lot like Teemu Selanne and Scott Niedermayer. He's reached a point in his career when he doesn't know what he wants to do, and that's fair, if he needs more time to decide if he wants to play and get ready. … Everybody wants him to play, but he has to want to play in his heart, and he's not ready for that yet.”

With the Leafs' training camp about to start, Wilson said Sundin's indecision won't be a distraction. “It seems to be the main attraction for you guys,” Wilson said. “You guys are the ones talking about it. We're not, down the room. I think our players are ready to move on, and if Mats at some point decides that he wants to be a Leaf, we'll greet him with open arms and he can make our team better.

“But we can't be waiting for the other shoe to drop, We watched that in Anaheim last year [with Niedermayer]. I was close by in San Jose and that really affected their team, and I don't know so much if it was the players. It was all the smoke about. I think our players deserve a little more respect and they should be allowed to prepare for life without Mats without being reminded of that every single day.”

In the meantime, Wilson says he's preparing for Sundin not to be a part of the team. If Sundin were to return several months into the season, Wilson said he'd treat it like a trade, except that the team wouldn't have to give up anybody “to get a great hockey player.”

“You don't want Mats Sundin here if he's only half-hearted into it,” he said. “Mats isn't ready to make that commitment to us or any other team in the league, and I respect that. I think that's honourable of him instead of coming in and telling everybody he wants to be here … and he's only half-hearted into it. If he decides he's not going to play, that's not bad for the Leafs. It's bad for the NHL, because he's truly been one of the great ambassadors of the game for almost the last 20 years.”

Wilson said his first priority, as soon as training camp starts, is to shore up the Leafs' defence. “In the past, the Leafs have scored a lot of goals, but we couldn't stop the other teams from scoring,” he said. “If you pay attention to the teams that actually win and that get to the finals, they are from the top five defensive teams in the league. The Leafs have been consistently in the bottom five. If you score five goals, but let in six, it's a defensive problem.”

Wilson said he'll spend time getting to know the players in training camp, but “you've got to see when the real bullets fly, who are the leaders on the team.”

Last year, he saw the Leafs blow a 2-0 lead in the third period. “But there were about 20 times that they did that, and the team crumbled,” he said. “That's a direct reflection on leadership.

“If the leadership was a burden on some of the people who aren't here any more, then we'll try to spread that out and shoulder the responsibility on a lot of younger people,” he said. “Inevitably, people step up and assume the leadership on a team when they see the opportunities are there.”