I don’t know these people. Maybe Reaves expresses a greater willingness to work with young kids. Maybe something in Kunitz’s attitude struck Gorton wrong. I have no real idea though, because I have nowhere near enough information having never interacted with those people.
I will say that team results are not simply a sum of what players bring on the ice. Well, I should rephrase. Team results are a sum of what players bring on the ice, but what those players bring on the ice is affected by what happens off the ice. So the evaluation of players who are being specifically brought in for their presence off the ice becomes something completely different. The extent to which that outweighs the on-ice performance depends on the particular GM and the specific role they’re looking to fill.
If the purpose of this is to improve the team’s performance in the long run by making the youngsters better professionals, then you might necessarily sacrifice some of the on-ice effect in the immediate future.