Tribute Praise Murray Edwards! Flames double number of Pro Scouts

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So why all the additions now, after Tre is gone? Was it Tre, who didn't want "too many" people in the organisation, or was he unable to convince Edwards that more people are needed?

As @Lunatik pointed out, the hockey ops group has steadily increased in size for the last few decades. It grew under Tre and it continued to grow under Conroy. Goalie coaching for instance exploding under Treliving, but even before that, the Burke POHO era was already a huge leap forwards towards improving that department.

IMO the sudden influx of new talent could be one of a few things. Ownership may have realized that investing a few million in these guys could pay out more than that in savings when a snafu is prevented. Ownership could have also requested certain types of information that Treliving previously collected himself, but suddenly, there's no one that was ever involved in collecting that info, so they've hired a few people to address that role.

Another is that in the past, Treliving didn't want to constantly add a ton of personnel before he fixed the mandate and structure. Keep in mind Tre overhauled a crap ton of the minors stuff and that was Treliving's hobby and primary focus due to where he came from. Now that much of this is now sorted out, it is a good time to start slotting personnel into the much more well defined roles.

Short answer: yes.

Conroy has said in the past that Treliving was rather closed and liked to make key decisions by himself. And he also went on to say that he, in contrast, wants to be more collaborative with his decision making.

At the same time, the organization has endured a ton of negative press over the last calendar year and change, much of it deserved. And as demonstrated in that past, nothing motivates Edwards to act other than the perception that the club is a laughing stock. The last time the Flames were this widely maligned was during the last years of GM Darryl Sutter's reign, which prompted Edwards to finally go out and hire an assistant GM and then shell out millions to bring Burke into the fold as president of hockey operations. So it'd make sense if all this negative attention helped Conroy and co. to convince Edwards that modernization was necessary.

One other possibility was Dave Nonis. He's been around the block so to speak and it's possible he pointed out all of the various ways in the which the Flames lagged behind the competition. Edwards was reportedly so pleased with how Nonis interviewed that he had wanted to name him GM before Maloney convinced him someone younger was necessary. Maybe if Nonis had made those arguments to ownership, they'd have been more inclined to follow through.

Treliving was rumored to be a hell of a workaholic. So I wonder if part of that relationship has two sides. Not purely that Treliving was completely against working with others and closed, maybe he just felt that others couldn't match his energy. He definitely did seem to show that he'd give his staff key projects and let them do their thing, but he'd also have multiple projects humming along as well.

For instance, in 2015, IIRC he had Conroy and the Scouting staff talk about how they were planning on drafting some good players. This ended up seemingly as a smokescreen, because Treliving and Burke apparently worked on Sweeney to consummate the Hamilton deal. I honestly think that Treliving had considered drafting and all that Conroy and the Scouts dealt with were not intentionally used as a smoke screen, but that deal was indeed a good deal at the time and IIRC, some of the other teams were kinda annoyed how it all played out and how few teams were involved in it at the time.

I think Treliving was a weird robot that performed at something like 175% effort of a typical GM. I think Sutter in some of his attempts to be a coach/GM might have also negated a requirement to hire such roles as well. Conroy is human and he can only attempt 95% as a rookie GM. Huska has his hands full dealing with being a rookie HC, so he's not going to attempt GMing as part of his role. I wonder if ownership acknowledges this and that's why Treliving's/Sutter's role might have been broken apart into many sub roles. The hockey ops group has steadily grown, but I agree it seems to have suddenly grown rapidly solely after the announcement of Treliving's and Sutter's departure. It required both of them to be gone before it was even contemplated.

Again, pure speculation.