Leafs GM Kyle Dubas is giving fans something to celebrate, though winning the deadline isn’t the goal
Dubas #Dubas
It is an admirable thing about the citizens of Leafs Nation. It has been 55 years and counting since they’ve celebrated the ultimate hockey victory. And still nobody is better at over-celebrating a freshly hatched hockey trade.
Organize a parade for Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas. Sign the man to a lifetime contract extension. Whether or not the on-ice product is actually better as a result of Dubas’s workaholic flurry of additions to the team in the lead-up to Friday’s trade deadline won’t be provable until April. What’s for sure is that the team is markedly different than it was heading into the playoffs a year ago, when the Leafs suffered the sixth straight opening-round series loss of the Shana-plan era. And different, for a perennial loser, has to be good.
What’s beyond doubt is that the new version of the team is more infused than it has ever been, at least in this era, with what team president Brendan Shanahan has termed “grit and compete level.” And if it’s not exactly a revelation that grit and compete level will play well to a Bay Street fan base that’s always had a lunch-bucket appetite, it’s a new thrust for Dubas, who has a reputation for rolling his eyes at such time-honoured clichés in the age of advanced stats.
Luke Schenn returns
Consider that Tuesday’s newcomers included two-time Cup champion and former Leafs good guy Luke Schenn, 33, who is nobody’s idea of an analytics darling. Schenn, acquired from Vancouver for a third-round pick, leads the league in hits, a stat pooh-poohed by the spreadsheet set. But along with 30-year-old defenceman Erik Gustafsson — who was brought over in a deal that sent 22-year-old Rasmus Sandin to Washington — the duo joins Monday acquisition Jake McCabe, a physical presence in his own right, in shoring up a Toronto blue line that had been short on snarl since Jake Muzzin left the picture.
Add that trio to the threesome of new-in-town forwards Ryan O’Reilly, Noel Acciari and Sam Lafferty — three players valued more for their reputation for competitiveness than for any specific statistical measure — and you could easily see Dubas’s furious shopping spree as an out-of-character casting call for old-fashioned, eye-test-proven character.
Heck, considering the Leafs just brought in six new players, and none has ties to the Sault, it’s fair enough to ask: Is Dubas even running this team anymore?
Leafs ‘more competitive’
He is. He is. But if Shanahan acknowledged after last year’s playoffs that the team was still searching for that elusive “killer instinct,” this looked a lot like Dubas’s last-ditch shot at taking the boss’s hint and finding the stuff.
“There’s no reason for us to really beat around it. We’ve wanted to become more competitive,” Dubas said.
What a concept: procuring players who will actually fight for every inch of net-front ice amid the heightened intensity of the post-season cauldron. Still, to a general manager who emerged from last year’s latest playoff failure asking for a chance to run it back, claiming unwavering belief in his group, this amounts to a substantial late-season reno with a scant 22 games to go — and with potentially more change to come. You can already hear this year’s respect-in-the-handshake-line rationalization should the Leafs incur the seventh straight first-round failure in the wake of the ninth anniversary of the Shanaplan: “Now we’ve got the team. We just need more time to jell!”
Judgement, though, is for another day. What’s undeniable is that a big part of the fun of pro sports comes in the player swapping. So in an era that’s seen close NHL observers bemoaning the lack of dealing among uber-conservative executives, cursing a hard salary cap that’s too restrictive and casting a longing eye toward the drama-infused NBA, this pre-deadline explosion of hockey moves amounts to welcome stuff. Beyond Leafland, Tuesday saw Patrick Kane move from Chicago to the New York Rangers, one of the greatest American-born players landing in America’s biggest city.
Fans love trades
In the NBA, which gets a lot of juice from its status as a real-life soap opera, high-profile transactions hinge largely on one thing: the restlessness of players who are both empowered and impossibly rich. In Toronto, there’s another compelling driver to the player-movement bonanza: The desperateness of Dubas.
If Dubas learns anything from this transaction-crazy deadline period, maybe it’ll be this: Fans love trades, and Leafs fans most of all. Which can go a long way in building public support for your tenure, which, considering Dubas is without a contract beyond this year, means at least something.
The giddiness about the changes, in this case, comes attached to a certain wisdom. If the Leafs expected to go into another post-season series against the same Tampa-based opponent with largely the same team, it’d be folly to expect a different result.
That’s why you won’t find a lot of fans fretting about the costs. That two more first-round draft picks flew out the door over the past handful of days means Dubas has now traded six first-round picks going back to the Muzzin acquisition in 2019. Toronto’s big-picture history suggests squandering picks for short-term desires has a way of leading to long-term despair.
Mortgaging the future for the now
Perhaps with an eye on that potential peril, Dubas got back a first-round pick in the move that brought Gustafsson to Toronto on Tuesday. Still, there’s no denying Dubas is mortgaging a big part of the future to serve the now, given that in the same deal he parted with a player he selected with a 2018 first-round pick, Sandin, to procure the 30-year-old Gustafsson, a rental.
And there’s no denying that, for all the massive change on Toronto’s periphery, the crux of previous failures still lies at the core. The Shanaplan builds off an untested blueprint, committing massive resources to high-priced forwards at the expense of the quality of talent from the net out. But quick, look over there — another trade!
To be fair, what Dubas is unfurling here amounts to a more robust approach to compensating for those bedrock deficiencies. If he has previously added a sprinkling of players to round out his core, this year he’s adding a deluge.
Then again, maybe Dubas has hit on a next-level masterstroke in the age of social media. Whether the moves ultimately translate to a long-sought playoff breakthrough might not even matter to a decent swath of Leafs Nation. Suddenly the fan base’s fixation isn’t on the need to win an impending playoff series. It’s on Dubas having won a series of trades.
For a fan base so long starved of a victory that’s tangible, there’s clearly joy in celebrating a triumph that’s here today, even if it’s strictly theoretical.
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