Toronto Maple Leafs President Brendan Shanahan can sense the frustration in Leaf Land.

Speaking to TSN’s The Drive with Dave Naylor, Shanahan addressed a hectic week that saw the team fire head coach Randy Carlyle.

“Our fans are angry. Our fans are frustrated. We’ve not been a very good team for many, many years. So that frustration and that anger is well earned,” Shanahan said. “The players understand that the only way out of this is to go out and play better hockey and to have success.”

One player that has been a lightning rod for criticism since Carlyle’s firing is winger Phil Kessel, who has been fielding questions and comments on multiple fronts. Shanahan addressed the Kessel concerns, calling the 27-year-old “one of the most dangerous, talented players in the NHL.”

“I think if you talk to Phil he’s going to be the first one to admit that he’s frustrated we’re not winning. He knows that he’s not happy when he’s not scoring. He wants this team to win.”

But the President would not let the perennial All-Star off the hook for his part in the team’s current 10th-place showing in the Eastern Conference.

“We need more from Phil, Phil knows that,” Shanahan added. “I think that the frustrating part for Phil is that he has been such a consistent performer as far as output of goals year, after year, after year.

That comes with the territory of being a star player. When your team doesn’t win, it really doesn’t matter what your individual success is. People are going to want more.”

The often media-shy Kessel has received his share of questions in the wake of Carlyle’s Tuesday dismissal. The Leafs’ top goal-scorer and point-getter every season since his 2009 arrival in Toronto was asked Tuesday if he believed he was a difficult player to coach and had to withstand criticism from his previous coach, Ron Wilson.

“You can’t rely on Phil. It’s just the way it is,” Wilson – who coached Kessel for parts of three seasons - told TSN Radio on Tuesday. “He comes and goes, and he gets emotional. He lets that affect his game and his relationship with other players.” 

Shanahan was less than appreciative of the former coach’s comments.

“I’ve got a lot of respect for Ron Wilson,” he told TSN Drive. “I don’t think that those comments are necessary. I think that he probably wouldn’t have appreciated it while he was a coach and it’s not something that helps us. He has a good relationship with Dave Nonis, so if he has advice or anything he wants to give, he could certainly make the call.”

As for his core group, Shanahan admitted that praise and criticism come in equal measure depending on the results on the ice.

“When you have success, your top players, your leaders, your core players get more credit than they deserve. When you don’t have success you will get more blame, maybe, than you deserve. They understand that this is about results and they understand that there is a lot of pressure on them to get those results.”

But Shanahan would admit that there is still work to be done both on and off the ice.

“They haven’t gotten the job done yet,” he said of his players, adding of his own performance: “I certainly wasn’t brought in here and I haven’t built the infrastructure of a management team that came to Toronto to simply have a good team that contends for the playoffs each and every year. Like a lot of teams in the NHL, it’s our goal to be a great team.”

“I know our fans are frustrated and they’d like for this to happen overnight , but that’s just simply not the way it works here.”

Shanahan addressed the Toronto media earlier on Friday, touching on several topics including the time-line for hiring a permanent replacement for Carlyle, the performance of both his players and his management team.

He gave interim head coach Peter Horachek his backing for the duration of the 2014-15 season, saying: “"Were going to wait until the off-season now."

"I've been pleased with just the early reports from Peter,” he added. "Peter will be one of the people that we will consider at the end of the year but we're going to wait until the end of the year."

As for how the team will respond, Shanahan told the media on Wednesday that the coaching change puts the onus back on the players to make the second half of the year a success.

"How they're going to be defined is really up to them at this point,” he told reporters. “I also wanted to make it very clear to them that we're watching and that we're on it. Whether we've seen some good things or bad things they're not getting by us, they're not escaping us. We're not going to be a group that is afraid to act if we feel we're going to be able to make ourselves better."