The Toronto Maple Leafs Best Choice for GM: John Chayka

The Toronto Maple Leafs fired Kyle Dubas yesterday in what will go down as one of the biggest mistakes in NHL history.

The Toronto Maple Leafs now former GM made a play at his boss’s job and lost.

Dubas wanted to have full autonomy, thus cutting Shanahan out of the decision making process. This would have been an extremely good thing, and it’s unfortunate that it didn’t work.

You could see why he would want that, as for years rumours (now all but confirmed) have persisted that Dubas was prevented from making moves he wanted to make and forced to make ones he didn’t.

Certainly several of this year’s moves appeared to be quite the opposite of what we were sold for the last five years. 

Now we are stuck with Shanahan, which is fine, but it’s concerning that he mentioned experience as a factor in hiring a GM. That is because outside of maybe Jason Botterill, most NHL GM’s with experience are extremely undesirable.

Toronto Maple Leafs Do Not Need an Experienced GM

Experience is overrated.  Especially in the NHL where most GMs are interchangeable and could be replaced by any random fan.

Brad Treliving is an early favorite for the job even though he’s never made it any farther in the playoffs than Dubas has, and even though his most famous trade was a frigging disaster.

Hiring him would be a horrible decision.

Peter Chiarelli, Ron Hextall, Marc Bergevin, Doug Armstrong, these are extremely stupid ideas that make me want to vomit.

After having one of the smartest, most progressive, innovative and intelligent managers in the world for the last five years, the last thing the Toronto Maple Leafs need to do is hand power over to a regressive ex-player whose been fired my other teams.

Brian Burke, horrible idea.

Jim Rutherford?  Are you kidding me?

Mark Hunter? At least he hasn’t been a GM before, but it’s still a silly idea when you consider how bad he was at drafting.  There is absolutely no way he should ever be considered.

If you are seriously considering any of these absolute geezers, then go with the ultimate Geezer himself, and give Cliff Fletcher a third spin.

The last thing the Leafs should do is care about experience.  Being an NHL GM is not hard.  Almost anyone could do it, and as long as someone provides you a list of phone numbers, you’re good to go.

I would be a better GM than Ron Hextall, Brad Treliving or any of the people listed above.  Significantly better.

Therefore, the play here is obvious: You give the job to Brandon Pridham or Eric Tulsky.   Smart, young and creative.  Not beholden to the same boring ideas of the old-boys club.

If you absolutely have to have experience, hire John Chayka the ex-Coyotes GM.  He’s smart, young, and analytically minded. He ran the Coyotes with basically no budget and both arms tied behind his back.  He was great at it.

Sure, he was punished for violating the rules of the NHL Combine, but that seems like pretty small potatoes.  Later he was suspended for seeking another job while employed by the Coyotes, but who wouldn’t do that? The ownership for the Coyotes is awful and if you know anything about them then you know Chayka was smart to try and get out.

The Leafs owe it to themselves to interview one of the smartest hockey people alive.

We’ll never know how close Dubas came to getting the total autonomy he deserved, and it sucks to think that we were so close to going down a different, amazing path.

The only optimism I have right now is that Shanahan made a gutsy and brilliant call once before when he chose Dubas over Lamoriello, and that he could do it again.

My choice for GM would be John Chayka, followed by Eric Tulsky and Brandon Pridham.