Kyle Dubas Goes Down as Best Toronto Maple Leafs GM Ever

The Toronto Maple Leafs have been an elite, contending team for the better part of the last decade.

Since the Toronto Maple Leafs drafted Auston Mattehws in 2016, they have made the playoffs every single year, and are now have the league’s longest active playoff streak.

While this is incredibly impressive (not to mention under-reported and under-appreciated) always making the playoffs does have one major drawback: no high draft picks.

Additionally, when you’re a top team trying to win every year, you tend to trade away a lot of draft picks.  Teams always face criticism for this, but it’s stupid criticism by the poorly informed – trading picks to win now is the correct move for any contending team.

Kyle Dubas Goes Down as Best Toronto Maple Leafs GM Ever

Still, for a team that hasn’t had any top picks, the Leafs farm system that Kyle Dubas left behind is pretty decent.  It may or may not end up producing any star players, but right now it’s incredibly underrated.

As for the team itself, they haven’t won anything over the last seven years, and while we wish that they did, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that it has been an amazing seven years stretch, one of the best in franchise history.

Sure, it would have been fun to win, but criticism for the Leafs, and Kyle Dubas specifically, over this time is nothing short of rabid and untethered.  It’s basically just political-type bashing by people with their minds made up and no interest in learning or considering new information.

The people who take to the internet to complain constantly about results fail to understand that goalies add a degree of variance to NHL results that other sports just do not have.  On top of that, the NHL Playoff tournament is designed, from its seeding to its relatively short series, to produce wacky results.

In the NHL, the best team’s do not always win.

It can be frustrating to watch, but fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs should keep in mind that despite Covid freezing the salary cap for four years immediately after they signed 4 x superstars with the assumption that a new TV Deal, Gambling and Expansion would super-charge the salary cap, the Leafs were still a top team over the last four years.

Regular season success should matter more than it does, after all, it’s much less random and the best teams actually are the best teams (unlike the Cup Final, which pretty much always has at least one surprise lucky contender).

But regardless of how you choose to view regular season success, playoff success is the standard we go by.  It’s not exactly logical, but whatever.  I can’t sit here and tell you a President’s Trophy would excite me very much.

Still, I think we should recognize that under Kyle Dubas the Leafs became an annual playoff team (big accomplishment, considering that prior to 2017, they made the playoffs once since the 2004-05 lockout) and were a contender every single year.

Dubas was the interim GM before the Leafs hired Lou Lamoriello, and he built this team.  Other than Morgan Rielly (who he re-signed) and William Nylander (who he re-signed and refused to trade) this is Dubas’ team, 100%.

He had a hand in keeping or acquiring every player on this roster (prior to this summer) and if they win next year, he’s going to have more to do with it than anyone.

The Kyle Dubas era was a complete and total success.  You can’t blame him for the cap freezing, you can’t blame him for any of the following

• Nazem Kadri getting suspended for 2 x game sevens
• Columbus setting an NHL Playoff Save Percentage Record
• Tavares injured vs Montreal
• Montreal becoming the only team in NHL history to blow multi-goal leads in back-to-back games and win both of those in overtime.
• Jack Campbell letting in a floater from 80 feet after the Leafs outshot MTL 12-0 in OT.
• The referees forcing the Leafs to beat Tampa 5 x in order to advance in 2022.
• Sergei Bobrovsky suddenly becoming Patrick Roy.
• Going 0-11 in elimination games, something so statistically unlikely that is should be impossible.

Sure, the Toronto Maple Leafs probably should have gotten better results during his tenure, but any kind of honest analysis shows they got ridiculously, preposterously, unaccountably unlucky, several years in a row.

Regardless, Kyle Dubas goes down as the best GM in Toronto Maple Leafs history.  Or, more accurately, since it’s impossible to compare today’s NHL to the past, he goest down as the best GM in post-expansion Toronto Maple Leafs history.