24 25 Salary Thread Crosbicles Volume Mmxxvii Retool over Time to Go for A Cup in 2026
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The topic being discussed was Dubas' attempts at returning the team to contention upon his first arriving in Pittsburgh. By definition, this meant becoming immediate contenders again.
How was Dubas’ Leafs tenure not disappointing? His mission was to win a Cup and he managed 1 playoff round win in 5 years.
How has Dubas’ tenure here not been disappointing when he was given one shot to get the team back respectability and did nothing but sign negative value contracts and keep a failed coaching staff together while the playoffs slipped away?
The goalposts may have shifted in terms of expectations, but it doesn’t take away the previous failure.
I’m glad that our aspirations have shifted from Stanley Cups to Calder Cups.
Wow, 5 years! That's such a long time. Every other team won a Cup during that time, why didn't the Leafs?
Sure, because those expectations weren't realistic.
The fact that success was impossible means that failure was also impossible.
For this season and perhaps the next one, they certainly have.
The good thing is that if we are fortunate to draft a player of Auston Matthews’ caliber here soon (which isn’t likely), we’ve got a GM capable of building a team around him good enough to win one playoff round in half a decade.
This is a scintillating philosophical discussion about Dubas, but I just want to know where the NJD-Pens GDT thread is? Because I want to cheer NJ on and hope they clobber us and Jarry, and his pretensions toward leading us to a lower draft pick! Carry on…
This is fundamentally a bad take & wrong analysis on Dubas on all fronts. Toronto is a losing organization going back decades. Not only have they not a won a Cup since the Pens entered the league, they haven’t even been to a Final in all that time. That’s not on Dubas at all. It’s headed by Shanahan which tells you all you need to know.
Dubas was the GM who guided that team to a playoff win for the first time in 20 years & built the Marlies Calder Cup title team a few years ago. Over the past 12 months, he’s created a ton of cap space & restocked draft capital. We essentially have 4 drafts over the next 3 seasons. No one comes close. And getting 2nd & 4th round picks for Luke Schenn is a master move.
You mention that every decision he made to give them one last run was wrong. How so? Bringing in the reigning Norris Trophy winner to fix an anemic power play? Bringing in a veteran who just came off a Cup? You know, guys have to produce too & coaches have to properly utilize the talent given.
I’ll grant you the Jarry contract was a bust & a misread, but hey, Craig Patrick traded Makus Naslund too, so there’s that. All GMs make bad decisions from time to time, but good GMs also try & fix their mistakes & create better opportunity for the future (see my point about 4 drafts in the next 3). Even now, they have the cap space to keep Jarry if they wanted to keep him another year vs a buyout (not saying this will happen nor advocating for it, but they could do so to possibly increase the potential on a trade scenario).
Perhaps you might be more comfortable with having Jeff Petry & Jan Rutta trolling the blue line instead.
It's entirely possible that it's just the mix of Matthews, Nylander, and Marner, and not Matthews himself, but if not, I hope that we don't draft a player of Auston Matthews' caliber. Auston Matthews does not seem to be the caliber of player who wins in the playoffs.
Dubas is calling the shots here. For most of the career at the Leafs, he had Shanahan or Lou operating at a higher level. He knows what is needed and is building the system to move to a roster that can compete again. Luck will play a part here as to talent availability. But draft picks next couple years with deals and that is here certainly is a start.
Yea, Shanahan was really running the show in Toronto and FSG won’t let him fire Sully. Always a boogyman. For a guy that is so brilliant, his teams seem pretty hesitant to give him total autonomy if that is true.
It would be a master move if the entire league wasn’t trading crappy players for massive pick returns. He got market value, which is good, but the bare minimum of the job. One of the reasons teams have been so free to ship picks around for 25 and 26 is that many are not too keen on the draft classes. We shall see if Dubas can find the gems in the rough.
He made 4 big moves his first summer here:
-Re-signed Jarry - Abject failure that everyone agrees with, and many of us called before it was even done.
-Signing Graves. Doesn’t matter how or why he has busted here, he has. That falls on the guy that signed the contract.
-Trading for Karlsson. Nobody has an issue with the asset management. How did that PP look last year after bringing him in? The fit has been terrible, mostly due to…
-Keeping Sullivan. He’s still here. His system is still getting caved every night. Dubas also sat and watched that anemic PP for another full season under a boob of an assistant coach as we missed the playoffs again because of it.
When Kyle Dubas pulls off a Ron Francis or Rick Tocchet or Trevor Daley trade that helps to secure a Cup then we can write off his fumbles like CP and JR. Until then, he’s just another mediocre GM fumbling around.
This organization would be in a better position today had we not made the move and got a competent coach instead. Granlund would have just been traded for a good return. Rutta too, assuming he wasn’t hurt like what prevented SJ from selling him.
Again, the issue wasn’t trading for Karlsson. It was trading for Karlsson and then watching the coach neuter the player from doing the only thing he is great at in the name of playing the “right” way.
They were the best moves available at the time. Hindsight is awesome but it's not real.
TJ was far and away the best goalie and coming off a 34-win season.
EK just won the Norris with 101 points.
Graves was the 2nd or 3rd rated Dman and 4.5M for a top 4 Dman is a great price.
They all didn't work, but I'm more inclined to look at the big picture and realize that it's a Sully issue and not a Dubi one. How many guys have to be great before coming here and/or after leaving that sucked under Sully before people realize what the problem is?
Regardless of the market intent, you don’t give him the credit when it’s due. That was a bold & brilliant move.
Sully is the highest paid coach in the league on a multi-year deal. FSG isn’t willing to eat that contract on a mediocre aging core that had/has no shot at a Cup. That’s bad business. People forget that. This is a business whether Mario or FSG own the majority stake. And here’s the thing, Mario did own the team during the supposed “bad days of Sully” too & didn’t fire him either. I personally don’t care who coaches this roster now since they aren’t competitive.
Again, look at the whole body of work vs your narrow minded agenda/bias. Before Dubas, we had an aging roster, limited cap space, a bad prospect pool, & Jeff Carter. Now, we have a younger roster, a good amount of cap space, the pipeline being restocked, & roster flexibility.
Sullivan is not here because FSG thinks they’ll have to eat his contract…he’ll be hired somewhere else I’m sure they agree…they actually think he’s a 2-3 coach lol and are influenced by what Sid and the core think, and they love him…that’s why he’s still here…any other team would have fired his ass by now, even the cheap ones lol
Considering he was fired two days after saying that he had to make big changes to the roster by Shanny, I'd say he didn't have full control in TOR. Looking at TOR now, on the verge of losing Marner for nothing in the summer, I'd say he was 100% correct in his thinking.
No, they don't. They simply don't care if it's good business or not. I mean, most normal people don't root for the owners bottom line, they root for the team on the ice. If it was still a locally-owned club, I'd be giving that line of thought more weight, but what should I or anyone care about a bunch of faceless Bostonian dipshits?
Again, Dubas has made some good and some very questionable moves here, but it's unlikely that all the questionable or bad moves were solely at the direction of FSG, so I'm not sure why people keep putting that up like some sort of invisible shield.
He's got nothing but time to turn it around, given that he's locked himself into a remaining 5 years of double paychecks, but it doesn't mean he shouldn't be criticized for those weird moves.
I will consider Kyle Dubas redeemed if he can make this a roster worth watching next year-- not if he makes the team extra profitable or if he does what FSG asks really well. I don't care if we don't even make the playoffs, but he has to give the audience more than just padding Sid's resume and catering to Sully's ego.
He's got nothing but time to turn it around, given that he's locked himself into a remaining 5 years of double paychecks, but it doesn't mean he shouldn't be criticized for those weird moves.
I will consider Kyle Dubas redeemed if he can make this a roster worth watching next year-- not if he makes the team extra profitable or if he does what FSG asks really well. I don't care if we don't even make the playoffs, but he has to give the audience more than just padding Sid's resume and catering to Sully's ego.
Are any of them in the room with us right now?
A lot of the Dubas criticism is so dumb on a fundamental level it doesn’t pass the common sense test, let alone the hockey knowledge test.
All of this shit is dumb, we are idiots on the internet talking about things we have no actual influence on which are being done for our entertainment, supposedly.
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