Toronto Maple Leafs: Treliving Needs to Keep Doing What Dubas Did Right

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a new GM and it’s impossible to have an opinion on him so far, because he hasn’t done anything. At worst, we can at least give the guy a chance.

One worry that some Toronto Maple Leafs fans may have about Brad Treliving is potentially shifting the Leafs back into “old hockey guy” territory.

In the NHL, almost every team follows the same playbook  based on the same clichés, and there is hardly any difference between most team’s philosophies.   In Toronto, Dubas was originally known as an “analytics” GM, but he didn’t really follow the principles of hockey analytics very strictly, especially this past season.

The Leafs had a giant analytics department that made decisions based on skill, or at least they did until this spring when they made the surprising decisions to bring in a whole bunch of older, gritty players like Acciari, Lafferty, O’Reilly and Luke Schenn, while giving up on Pierre Engvall and Rasmus Sandin.

The Leafs this season did not seem like the Kyle Dubas team of old, and so it really isn’t surprising that he ended up making a play for more power, then ultimately moving on.

It would be easy to say that this past trade deadline was more Shanahan than Dubas, but we’ll never know.  Dubas has never been just one thing.  He defied categorization, and,  for example, the Leafs have never really been a true “analytics team.”

Toronto Maple Leafs: Sticking With What Dubas Did Right

The reality is a lot more complicated, as Dubas tried to split the difference between old and new school thinking.  Still, even if he wasn’t as dedicated to the analytics as he maybe should have been, Dubas did three things which were the antithesis of the Old Hockey Guy philosophy.

What Dubas was good at was:

1) avoiding paying term and money to old players over 30 or heading into their 30s.

2) recognizing that non-star players are practically interchangeable and organizing the salary cap accordingly. This means not over-paying for depth players.  

 3) not giving term or money, or paying assets to acquire goalies, who are unpredictable and almost always a bad investment.   

Going forward,  Treliving would be wise to stick with those three  building blocks, as they are indisputably the correct way to manage a team in a salary cap league.

Brad Treliving said all the right things at his press conference, but a look at his term in Calgary shows that he isn’t shy about signing old, declining players to long-term contracts, paying big money to goalies, or overpaying for depth players.

In the NHL, there is almost no difference between non-star players, so it makes sense to stick with the top-heavy cap strategy.   As far as we know, based on his work in Calgary, Treliving never considered this.  

And as far as the goalie things goes, he signed Jacob Markstrom to a huge and unfortunate contract.

He also signed Huberdeau and Kadri well into their 30s, and there was the whole James Neal/Milan Lucic fiasco, and the longterm deal handed out to Chris Tanev.

None of this looks good for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but we can hope that Treliving and Shanahan can identify what Dubas did right and stick with that, while learning from their past mistakes.