As someone who had initially wanted Dubas to come back, my opinion has since soured about him after Shanahan's comments.
This is a guy who had no NHL experience and was hired to the most lucrative NHL team. He was quickly fast tracked to the GM, and was offered resources he would not get in other teams. He was allowed to dump salaries of bad contracts he signed and given the resources to do so. There's not too many NHL teams that would allow a GM to dump a bad contract the same year it was signed and eat millions in salary like the Leafs allowed Dubas, a competitive advantage.
In return, he mortgaged Toronto's future for 1 series win in 5 years. We barely have any draft picks this year, and one first round pick until 2026.
Despite all that, Shanahan was willing to give him the opportunity to grow with the team he lead despite having no success on a team offering him competitive advantages. He takes that opportunity and runs to the media and talks about how hard the job is on his family and tries to leverage his lack of success to a higher pay, whereas by any objective metric he should have been fired.
Dubas obviously doesn't believe in the team he built or he would have wanted to see it through. No other GM's in the league have been given the opportunity, chances and talent he was given from the start and done nothing with it and had the opportunity to continue. He took the first round victory, his only in 5 seasons, after trading the 2023 1st and 2025's 1st in additional to all the 1sts he traded away previously (Marleau, Mrazek, Foligno, etc.) as an opportunity to ask for a raise and be melodramatic on the difficulties of the job?
If what Shanahan said was the case, I 100% support his decision to fire Dubas. Let him try to verbally persuade another team he's the smartest guy in the room because his results do not.
He comes across as an entitled narcissist, the same vibe that Dallas Eakins and Mike Babcock have.
