How on Earth did Kyle Dubas manage to get this job?
What is it about him? Is he okay being a doormat and that is why he was an attractive target (this assumes Penguin ownership likes hiring puppets)?
He certainly wasn't a good GM in Toronto.
Grossly mismanaged the salary cap by paying 4 forwards half the allowable cap room. This left him resorting to bargain-bin players to fill the bottom half of the roster and the all-important goaltender position. Has a team ever won the Stanley Cup with a $10.0+ million dollar player on their team? Not many, if any at all. And Dubas had THREE such players. It would be one thing if those players were McDavid, MacKinnon, and Kucherov. Even that would be an excessive amount of money tied into a forward core. But at least that would be better than Matthews, Marner, and Tavares, none of who has proven to be impact playoff players.
Moving forward. he witnessed the same core of players failing for many years in a row, and refused to make any changes during the entire time. Normally in a business when you choose your core business strategy and that strategy fails, then you make adjustments to the core business strategy. You don't keep the same strategy for years and years when it is failing every single year. Dubas should have been fired from Toronto for his refusal to even consider making any changes.
Poor signings and trades for players such as Mrazek, Murray, etc., forced him to burn draft picks in order to fix his own mistakes. This is brutal in the current era of NHL hockey, where having your own drafted players on the roster is very important because they are salary-controlled and cost-controlled.
He hired his buddy Sheldon Keefe, who I think we can all agree is mediocre at best and subpar at worst. How was Sheldon Keefe at all qualified for the job that he was gifted by his friend Kyle Dubas?
The list of Dubas failure and mistakes goes on and on.
So how does such a person get a President of Hockey Operations job?