The Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas is having an extraordinary debut season as a General Manager.
While it’s generally great for the Toronto Maple Leafs, their fans and the city, the best part is that he’s proving the detractors wrong. He’s not just having a good season for a rookie. He’s having one of the best seasons a professional sports general manager has ever had. Everything he touches turns to gold.
He doesn’t get any credit, as it seems old-school types are loathe to admit they weren’t just wrong, but they were “the sun rotates around the earth” and “This Vanilla Ice kid is the future of music” wrong.
Now normally, I would not care about proving detractors wrong – people have bad takes all the time, so who cares?
But the NHL, including owners, managers, and media, is an old-boys club that deserves all the comeuppance it can get.
For example:
- NHL broadcasts feature almost no women or people who are minorities.
- The mainstream media has been apathetic about the way the game is changing, choosing instead of mock bloggers and their fancy new stats. The broadcasts of games are now pathetically outdated as old white guys, whose only qualifications are having once played in the NHL, laugh about “Corsi” as they cite outdated face-off and plus-minus stats with total ignorance.
- NHL management jobs tend to be restricted to “Hockey Men” i.e guys who have played in the NHL, and in most cases, have been in NHL Management before.
- Anything that goes against any of this is publicly mocked, often while ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary.
In general, it would accurate to say that the NHL and a lot of the media that covers it is run by people with an outdated perspective on things that are protective of their way of doing things and hostile to new ideas.
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So when the NHL’s oldest and most storied team hired a 32 year old who had never played the game at a high level, the typical water carriers in the media mocked his appointment. They talked about how HOCKEY GUY Mark Hunter was the best choice.
They talked about what a mistake it was to fire Lou Lamoriello – an ancient battle ax who wouldn’t even let his players grow facial hair.
And, when Lou’s first four moves were to lose his best player and sign or trade for three bottom-of-the-lineup players, and Kyle’s was to sign John Tavares, and lock a star young player into an obvious team-friendly long-term contract, the Professional Hockey Writers Association voted Lamoriello as a top three candidate for GM of the year in their mid-season rankings.
A prominent Leafs reporter for a major media outlet wrote yesterday, mockingly, about Dubas getting taken to school by commission based sales agents. (some lame dad joke about him buying a new car and the sales guy getting excited). Of course, he must be mocked, I mean, he is only 33 years old. Just completely ignore the fact that he signed the NHL’s second best player to a contract that is obviously team-friendly, and mock him because you think he shouldn’t even be allowed to have the job he has.
Don’t do any research at all, just pretend its a bad deal because he’s not a 56 year old ex NHL player.
Team Friendly Deals
But the fact is, that the Toronto Maple Leafs have Auston Matthews, who is 21 and getting better, for just slightly more than they are paying John Tavares, who is 27 and as good as he’ll ever be. This is a good cap hit for today, and as the contract ages it is going to be relatively cheap in the sense that as the cap goes up, the value this contract provides will also rise.
Same thing with Nylander. Sure, he’s not scoring at the expected rate, but if you look at his peripheral numbers, he’s playing fantastic. And I don’t care if you don’t care about the numbers. We are past that. Anyone who chooses to ignore statistical evidence doesn’t get a vote. The mainstream media will cater to these people, but riddle me this: in what other topic is it considered controversial to measure something?
Sure, five years ago you could legitimately question if the use of advanced analytics was going to work. But that question has been answered. Teams that use analytics to make decisions are better. A typical NHL broadcast still won’t talk about shot-attempts, but the entire NHL is changing.
So as Sportsnet brings on Brian Burke to yell non-sense and misinform viewers, people who know better are hitting mute and going online to find better analysis.
It is not my opinion that Kyle Dubas has singed Auston Matthews and William Nylander to team friendly deals, it is a fact.
Matthews, since the start of last season, is third in the NHL on a points-per-hour basis. Connor McDavid scores 0.03 points more than he does every 60 minutes, and Matthews scores more goals.
Last season, William Nylander scored 45 points 5v5, even though Auston Matthews missed 25% of the season. This was the 11th highest total in the NHL, and one point off the tenth highest total. Since the start of last season to last night, he is 41st in the NHL in points/60, which is more than Sidney Crosby. During that time, he was bounced around the lineup, missed 20 games due to a holdout, played 20 games where he was getting back into game shape and then endured one of the unluckiest streaks possible.
And this player only costs a seven million dollar cap hit for the next five years.
So Kyle Dubas has done more than just OK. He’s signed the biggest UFA in NHL history, he re-signed two young stars to team-friendly deals and he traded for Jake Muzzin. And those are just the big moves – Tyler Ennis, Trevor Moore, a few minor trades, the drafting, etc. etc. etc.
If you had to rate job he’s done out of ten, you’d have to give him a ten. Objectively. Unless you’re an ex-NHL player on TV and you don’t recognize the ability of anyone who isn’t a HOCKEY GUY to do anything harder than breathing, then you’d go on TV in early February 2019 and with a straight face tell the millions watching at home that Lou Lamoriello – whose biggest moves are trading and signing for fourth liners, and lucking out on a scrap heap goalie who is inline to win the Vezina – has done a better job.
Watching the 33 year old Kyle Dubas run circles around the ancient club of ex NHL players who make up the ranks of GMs, Agents and the Mainstream Media is nothing short of delightful.
As someone whose watched Boomers mock Millenials for years, without a trace of irony, as they burned the world to the ground, it’s a small victory. But it’s all we’ve got.
stats from Naturalstattrick.com