Toronto Maple Leafs: Few, If Any, GMs Ever Walked Into a Better Situation

The Toronto Maple Leafs wanted to extend Kyle Dubas this summer.

Unfortunately for the Toronto Maple Leafs players, franchise, and fans, the team did not foresee that Dubas would try to leverage his contract negotiations into stealing Brendan Shanahan’s job.

The Board sided with Shannahan and the rest is history. 

The Leafs were forced to panic-hire Brad Treliving without seeming to put much thought into it.

But though he wasn’t their first choice, Treliving walked into a sweetheart of a situation. 

Toronto Maple Leafs: Very Few GMs Ever Walk Into a Better Situation

The reason the Leafs wanted to re-sign Dubas is because despite not winning in the playoffs, the decision makers for the billion-dollar+ know enough not to base their future on the results of high-variance tournament.

So despite the Leafs recent playoff failures, the Board was willing to go back to Dubas because his team was a top-three NHL team playing close to .650 hockey over the last four seasons, since the team fired Mike Babcock.

Fans might not have to care about should-have’s and luck, but people making decisions very much care about these things, because they want to look smart and keep their jobs, so they divorce themselves from emotions and look at the data.

And the data is very clear: Kyle Dubas authored the best competitive period of Toronto Maple Leafs hockey in decades.

However, he made a play to be President and lost.

Enter Brad Treliving. 

Treliving was brought into a team that had their five-man core all signed for next season.  All of those players are in their primes.

In addition to this, Dubas set him up with Woll and Samsonov, a high potential duo that makes under $4.5 million, and gives the Leafs (by far) the best goaltending situation in the NHL.

All Treliving had to do was convince Matt Murray to go on the LTIR and that was that.

In addition to having a core of superstars signed for the upcoming season and an amazing goalie situation, Treliving was also left with 10 expiring contracts, which allowed him to spend over $18 million this off-season.

Massively emotional and uninformed fans keep talking about “the mess” Dubas left, but those people are angry and not interested in the objective truth.

The objective truth is this:  Outside of maybe Stan Bowman, no GM has ever walked into a better situation than Brad Treliving.  His team is an contender, and he had a ton of money to spend.

Plus, almost all his guys are up for new contracts, meaning he can do what he wants with the team.

Kyle Dubas is a legend who likely won’t ever get his due for how good of a GM he actually was. The Pandemic hurt the Leafs more than any other team, and there was some really bad luck along the way (such as going 0-11 in elimination games, a circumstance which had less than a one-percent chance of happening).

But he’s gone and that’s fine – Treliving might turn out to be a great GM, even if he walked into the best circumstances possible and immediately made a series of unforced errors.  He can still improve, after all, he just got here.