With so many red lines and rigid vision, the 4th line tinkering is one of the few places where he can actually do GM work. And it's aimless and doesn't learn from past success or failure or the other teams he's playing. The fact that they've already been cycling through the Aube-Kubel and Aston Reese experiment and defaulting to Simmonds and Clifford kind of tells you there's no plan, no confidence. If he was confident in his build, wouldn't we be attributing early season sluggishness to just acclimatization?
Well, it's a different sport and the translation/application is poor. You'll notice the Leafs tend to avoid sending the puck north, deploying non traditional bump backs, curls, lateral passes and avoid creating future one on one puck retrievals. They like being on top of the opposition at a high rate but take out the physicality from the equation. They activate much lower skillset players to execute high skill plays (Justin Holl pinches, Pierre Engvall and Alex Galchenyuk holding the puck in dangerous areas through transition, Kerfoot ice dancing at center ice in Game 7 with a drop pass). They don't behave like a typical hockey team because they're trying to reinvent the possession aspect from another sport.
They have no idea how to manage a game clock, play physical attrition, lengthen the ice to make the opposition with dump ins, chip and chase, honest board work, sealing walls.
Like I mentioned earlier, his pyramid consists of a completely rigid core and an interchangeable bottom. He doesn't respect goaltending so it's a revolving door. Even the Holl, Kerfoot, Engvall portion of the roster seems to have fossilized. His belief in his coach makes doesn't seem to come from anywhere.
The only place where he allows changes are at the mercenary bottom. Things don't work out? It's Barabanov, Lehtonen and Ozhiganov on little mercenary contracts. It's guys like Ennis who shouldn't have been here in the first place. It's the convenient scapegoats like Ritchie. It's going to be Aube-Kubel, Aston-Reese and maybe some little tap dance with Clifford and Simmonds. The cheap window dressing who are barely Leafs to begin with.
I think the bet on the Big 4 is actually fine in the sense that if they do in fact flame out nobody will singing the what could have been tune. That's worth something because we've been exhausting this method.
Where I think Dubas really deserves to be criticized heavily is instead of building a conventional supporting cast of meat and potatoes, size and work ethic to surround and protect his core, he's pursued his little projects who never made sense by design or on the ice.
I think prognosticating from the actions of the fourth line nine games into a flat start season is a waste of time. The problem with the team is entirely Matthews and Marner right now, this is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that people are looking for accountability in exactly the wrong places. And frankly, the fact that we rolled it back for a sixth time speaks to me as having a plan and confidence in it. The plan is to get to the playoffs and let the stars figure it out. The fourth liners are the notes in the margins, but the fans keep falling for the idea that if we just get the right players on league minimum contracts everything will sort itself out.
I think we agree fundamentally that the big 4 is what has boxed Dubas into this position.
I see all of those things that you're saying about how the Leafs play, but I don't think the conclusion makes sense. None of that is about reinventing a possession game, it's entirely about a team that is made of individual egos. I think blaming it on possession game plans is entirely a red herring. If you write a paragraph about how they don't play a proper possession game, it's not that they're trying to reinvent the possession game, it's that they just don't play one. They are a team that tries to be high skill and play high risk, high reward. They have a lot of possession because they are quite good hockey players, but they simply do not play that style at all.
Agreed that they don't do the physical work that leads to success. It's the skill game that is the trap for them, not possession. Our roster the last two years, both blueline and bottom six are built to play this kind of physical hard work game and it got us 115 points and a great playoff series last year. This year things are just a shitshow up and down the entire team. When the team really struggles, it's generally because the big 4 aren't putting in the work. The team always, always, always follows their lead.
I agree with all of the stuff about the mercenaries, but again not the conclusion that you draw. Needing to try randoms from Europe is one of the logical conclusions of the big 4 bet. Most of the mercenaries don't work out, but when we get guys like Mikheyev it shows that the idea has merit. When we get 60 points from a Bunting on an ELC, I have to tip my hat and recognize that the little projects occasionally bear fruit. This year seems to be one of the weakest groups he's brought in, and he deserves criticism for that, but it all stems from the bet on the big 4. That's the decision point that actually matters. If we like the bet on the big 4, I don't see why we should be getting mad at the GM for playing it out as best he could.
I think your last paragraph does a really good job explaining some of my frustration with much of the debate surrounding Dubas. You say that we need a conventional supporting cast of meat and potatoes, size and work ethic, but two paragraphs ago are posting about how bad Clifford and Simmonds are. Getting upset about the Malgin's of the world has never made sense to me because the 13th forwards just don't matter enough when we're discussing a GM's future and I don't blame the GM for trying to moneyball a little bit. I don't care what conventional wisdom has to say, good hockey players come in all shapes and sizes and I'm not mad that he tried for unconventional success stories. Ennis is one of the most successful fourth liners we've had in this entire era, telling me that he never belonged here in the first place just tells me that you have a rigid opinion of team building.
But at the end of the day, if we have no cap space because of the big 4 bet, what else is he supposed to do with the bottom six? We can't plunder the defense (which I think Dubas has done quite a good job with over the years), and we've already running shoestring budget goallies. How are we supposed to have good consistent depth with no cap space? That is simply the consequence of the big 4 bet and the flat cap and there's no other way around it. When I see people say that they like the big 4 bet and then blame Dubas for the consequences of having no cap space, that's where I see that the logic has died. If we wanted better depth, we needed to end the big 4 experiment long ago, because all of this is just how that bet is playing out.
Goaltending is the one place that I think is truly the Achilles Heel, and will be what tips the scales if Dubas is fired.
