Jesus - he secured a 7 year/40M contract using big words.
This right here is a lesson to kids out there. Use big words and go to Brock instead of Harvard and pretend you're analyzing stats that only you can see.
Burke, the Harvard graduate Pittsburgh fired for Dubas said it best:
"The nerds are smart. They're making up stats only they can replicate so you have to hire them"
None of these new advanced analytics has equalled success yet - but Dubas secured arguably the biggest POHO contract in the NHL with no results. Shanahan for reference got 12.5M over 5 (2.5M a year).
I doubt that it was the money in Toronto, but what I said above. A power struggle.
Dubas basically said that it was Shanahan or him with his demands. Choose.
Toronto chose. Time will tell if they chose right,
It's not like Pittsburgh was the only team who would have paid for Dubas. reports are that at least one other team was competing for him.
If in the end the choice was made to save a few million dollars in a market like Toronto where the fans pay a fortune for seats I would riot if the choice did not turn out to be right.
In Pittsburgh, we have no crystal ball. I can not tell the future.
But a couple of things that I love about the move. FSG identified their top candidate, one with a definite clear plan that I can understand, They spent whatever it took to get him, and gave him the power without meddling and time, the better part of a decade, to prove his plan. Patience.
As a fan you can not ask for anything more from ownership.
As for the choice, Thank God it was forward thinking.
Pittsburgh for years was the same old school hiring of buddies whether they had skills or not for management. Two of the three fires made immediately by Dubas were buddies of Hextall's that he played with.
That old school approach should be dead. Not that being an ex-player should exclude you from the job. Spezza is rumored as a candidate to come over and shouldn’t be excluded simply because he played. But it became too often the sole criterion.
Hell, the Pens hired a guy with zero hockey experience once as one of the top executives because he worked on a political campaign with one of the owners.
This hire may work. It may not. But it was the right idea.
To quote the movie Money Ball:
I mean, anybody who's not building a team right and rebuilding it using your model, they're dinosaurs. They'll be sitting on their ass on the sofa in October, watching the Boston Red Sox win the World Series.