The Toronto Maple Leafs are not going to be distracted by the status of their general managers contract.
The Toronto Maple Leafs won’t be affected by Kyle Dubas‘ “lame duck” status.
And therefore whether or not he has a contract is largely irrelevant.,
But the Leafs should still do the smart thing and extend him, or it will haunt them for years.
Toronto Maple Leafs Need to Retain Kyle Dubas
No general manager is perfect, but NHL general managers are notoriously bad.
For years the NHL was run by ex-players who supposedly knew everything about hockey. Then one day, some teams got the idea that they could get a competitive advantage by crunching the data. Overtime, this caught on but it created a split between old geezers who just guessed at what they assumed was the best move, based on a player’s reputation, and people who arrived at their decisions empirically.
As luck would have it, the NHL’s richest team and biggest perennial failure decided to back a young analytics-trained hockey-lifer who straddled both the old and new hockey worlds.
He’d instill a love of learning, communication, collaboration and communication into the philosophy of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Under Kyle Dubas the Leafs wouldn’t revolutionize the NHL, but they became a team that put their mathematical assumptions into practice.
But after four years, it’s the former that characterizes the Leafs, who have become widely known as a players-first team in a league that has long been the opposite of that.
That is why the Leafs can’t afford to lose Kyle Dubas.
His moves as a GM have been both good and bad. The road to success has had some bumps in it, but ultimately the Toronto Maple Leafs are coming off a franchise record regular season.
Playoff success would be nice, but the NHL’s four best teams were in the same division and the path out of the Atlantic was ridiculous. There is no shame in losing to Tampa and being the team that deserved to move on.
For that, Kyle Dubas deserves a contract extension.
The Toronto Maple Leafs would be silly to fire him before he’s even had time to graduate any prospects. And since the Leafs haven’t drafted high under his stewardship, it’s not unusual that most of his picks haven’t had time to work out yet.
Kyle Dubas signed all of his best players to contracts based on the convergence of TV, Gambling and Expansion, and then was hit by four years of a flat cap. Despite that, he built a perennial contender that finished 4th overall last year.
— Editor in Leaf (@EditorinLeaf) September 23, 2022
That alone warrants an extension.
The Kyle Dubas Era should only just be starting out. The Leafs young GM has built an excellent foundation, and the future of this team is exceedingly bright. To punish him for not winning when it’s really only been six years since the team drafted first overall, in a league where the term “five year rebuild” is more than a cliché, seems completely idiotic.
I get that Dubas is unpopular, but don’t forget that in today’s day and age, the angriest people speak the loudest, but are not representative of the whole.
And even if they were, who cares?
The Toronto Maple Leafs should be run by people smart enough to know better. And besides, they just sold their souls to get some walking around money, so it’s clear they don’t even care what anyone thinks, so the perception that re-signing Dubas as unpopular shouldn’t matter.
The Leafs need to sign Kyle Dubas before he ends up running a team with better luck and people actually realize how good he is. Basing his future and the future of this franchise on the results of some random future playoff series is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Dubas is the Leafs GM and they should sign him immediately.