Confirmed with Link: Shanahan, Dubas, Keefe all staying

[francis246]

f***! It is here! Perfect formula, your genius! Now we just acquire Yzerman from Detroit and send him this message and tell him to execute!

I think most of the championship teams are build around their strengths that come from the composition of their top players. 10% of teams get Vezina level goaltending and 90% are screwed and same goes with those Norrisesque defenders. You can't just pick them or trade Marner for them. You could trade Matthews for them, but then we would be enviously here commenting that "You need 6'4" Selke center that is scoring 60 goals to win the cup".

If this would be this easy I think there would be way more top teams in the league. If you draft "Vasilevsky" of the draft every year for 20 years you get maybe 2 of those Vezina level goaltenders. Same with defenders.

It is problematic that we have our top players in the offense, but it isn't just dumping one of them and getting another 10 mil player back. During our build there have been two elite players available as UFAs Tavares and Pietrangelo, other than that it's gamble every time and it was also with those two.

We have top players to build around, it isn't given situation in this league even if you have top5 pick every year. Trade one away if you will, but then you have to SURE to utilize that cap space more effectively. We have acquired core pieces like Muzzin, Brodie etc. every year despite of those contracts. We have missed on Pietrangelo, but you can't trust your build around saving cap space for that situation to present itself, because it usually doesn't happen.

In that reality Shanahan and our staff work. Not in the wonderland of Willy Wonka.

Perfectly said and which is why I said the Leafs brass would do the Tavares signing if given the chance to again.

 

[Dreakmur]

Again no it isn’t. The Tavares contract didn’t stop Dubas from paying the Matthews, Marner and Nylander team friendly post ELC bridge deals, Dubas stopped Dubas from that with poor negotiation. UFA contracts and post ELC contracts are completely different and really shouldn’t even be compared. You don’t have leverage in a UFA deal and with a UFA deal you will overpay slightly to secure the asset. Dubas made a conscious decision to give up leverage on the RFA deals because he got scared the players would sign offersheets or actually sit. That is the deadly mistake, ask any business owner. They aren’t afraid or even regret risks (UFA signings). What they regret is when they are in control of an asset and don’t take advantage of the control over the asset they have.

Dubas HAD ALL THE CONTROL & LEVERAGE!! - why do you keep ignoring that fact like it’s made up? No other team beside our team overpaid their star RFA’s.

Just because he overpaid the RFAs doesn’t mean the Tavares contract wasn’t a mistake.

Perfectly said and which is why I said the Leafs brass would do the Tavares signing if given the chance to again.

If they would do it again, they’re morons.

 

[francis246]

Just because he overpaid the RFAs doesn’t mean the Tavares contract wasn’t a mistake.

The two are not mutually exclusive and you keep trying to bind them together. They have nothing to do with each other. If you want to call the Tavares contract a mistake that’s fine, but to continue to say it forced Dubas to over pay on the ELC’s is false. Dubas did that by choice, John Tavares and his contract had nothing to do with it. It was a rookie mistake by Dubas.

If he bridges the post ELC contracts then I think it’s more probable people stomach the Tavares contract a bit more. But to me, if you’re going to swing big on a UFA and get him I’m willing to accept the slight over payment. I rather have an overpaid Tavares than an overpaid 3rd or 4th liner who cashed in on a good year and is being forced higher in the line up to to make a more “balanced team”.

 

[Dreakmur]

The two are not mutually exclusive and you keep trying to bind them together. They have nothing to do with each other. If you want to call the Tavares contract a mistake that’s fine, but to continue to say it forced Dubas to over pay on the ELC’s is false. Dubas did that by choice, John Tavares and his contract had nothing to do with it. It was a rookie mistake by Dubas.

If he bridges the post ELC contracts then I think it’s more probable people stomach the Tavares contract a bit more. But to me, if you’re going to swing big on a UFA and get him I’m willing to accept the slight over payment. I rather have an overpaid Tavares than an overpaid 3rd or 4th liner who cashed in on a good year and is being forced higher in the line up to to make a more “balanced team”.

If he bridges the RFAs, the Tavares contract is still bad. It’s not only bad because he hasn’t individually lived up to that cap hit, but also because of how it has boxed us into the current core makeup.

Yes, the RFA deals made it worse, but it started with the Tavares deal.

 

[francis246]

If he bridges the RFAs, the Tavares contract is still bad. It’s not only bad because he hasn’t individually lived up to that cap hit, but also because of how it has boxed us into the current core makeup.

Yes, the RFA deals made it worse, but it started with the Tavares deal.

Again completely based on your perception of the situation just like mine is. There isn’t a right or wrong answer. I’m not a fan of Dubas so me even giving him credit kind of sickens me, but They’ve still built a solid team despite the “cap restrictions” and a flat cap. We can’t change the fact that Covid happened, again people are making it seem like Tavares is this anchor and bad captain. He’s still a premier player in the league, overpaid by 2 million at most. Last time I checked Tavares is one of the few players on the roster that has advanced past the first round and did it with less talent around him than the leafs have.

A lot of the issues that the leafs have with their team is stemming from the young core 4 (Matthews, Marner, Nylander and Rielly) that they have committed to. I think maybe the solution is to change one of those 4 parts.

 

[francis246]

If he bridges the RFAs, the Tavares contract is still bad. It’s not only bad because he hasn’t individually lived up to that cap hit, but also because of how it has boxed us into the current core makeup.

Yes, the RFA deals made it worse, but it started with the Tavares deal.

Also it didn’t box us in, Dubas’ decisions after signing that contract boxed us in. We still had a shit ton of cap space to play with even after signing Tavares, that’s what made signing Tavares so appealing because even with him signed they had all this money to build a solid team around him. Dubas’ next steps with that free money is what boxed us in. He decided instead of spreading the wealth among all the young players for a short period of time, let’s give big money to 3 of our young guys and then we’ll get rid of the other young guys who we can’t afford (again rookie mistake). He should have done everything possible to convince them to take a bridge and keep that young core that graduated together, a team (Nylander, Hyman, Kapanen, Brown, Johnansson, Engvall, Marner, Matthews) but he CHOSE not to.

 

[deprw]

If he bridges the RFAs, the Tavares contract is still bad. It’s not only bad because he hasn’t individually lived up to that cap hit, but also because of how it has boxed us into the current core makeup.

Yes, the RFA deals made it worse, but it started with the Tavares deal.

This Tavares signing is easy to label now as mistake, but there is different timeline, where in hindsight we regret not signing him. If he scores 100p for other franchise and we didn't sign him there would have been outrage. At the time we didn't knew that Marner is real deal, it could have been 60-70p smallish winger, but he really pan out.

In the end when building winning team most important pieces are centers, defenders and goalies. Not put in any order. You can't usually acquire 1st line centers, first pair defenders or star goalies from UFA market. Trough trade it's sometimes possible, but I don't remember any good trades from last ten years that comes to mind. Fox wanted to go to New York and forced his way there. Teams are pretty cautious about trading those key pieces too early.

In the end to get into position that there is star caliber player to be had for free (no assets) and he is willing to sign with you. That is pretty rare circumstance. Really hard to pass by and would have resulted pretty hard outrage from the fans. It's pretty easy to see why we signed Tavares.

Travel back to that moment and do that decision by yourself. I think it would be impossible to say no to Tavares. Even if you're experienced hockey executive, because they really know that those signings don't happen often. Star during his prime changing team.

He should have done everything possible to convince them to take a bridge and keep that young core that graduated together, a team (Nylander, Hyman, Kapanen, Brown, Johnansson, Engvall, Marner, Matthews) but he CHOSE not to.

I think we have done good job consisting that young core. Getting rid of Johnsson and Kapanen was right decision. It is also hard to see scenario where we should have kept Hyman with contract he got. First contract to Hyman was perfect job from us. I think Brown would have been good piece, but was casualty of bad cap management from Lou.

I think we have built older core beside our youngsters in Tavares, Rielly, Muzzin and Brodie, because like have seen it's hard to win with young team. Even BlackHawks had their experienced players and defenders drafted earlier and Toews & Kane were finishing pieces. It's balancing act to build winning team and you can't just acquire pieces you need. It's gamble to bring player from outside because it's rare that you get exactly right player in right phase of his career to right place in your team. In salary cap world. Goodrow and Coleman are perfect examples for Tampa Bay. We need to him home run this summer for that kind of pieces + fix our goaltending.

 

[Nineteen67]

When Lou was fired the team was a minimum of three years away from their five year window to contend, assuming the core five were as good as advertised.
The plan should have been to keep developing, drafting, acquiring, evaluating and signing the worthy RFAs to long term contracts.

Instead, Dubas did what he did. Now the plan is hope.

 

[LeafEgo]

The only blemish on Babs record with the Leafs is that the team was atrocious defensively every single year, and then were immediately good defensively the moment he was replaced.

Babs and Lou have the grand distinction of absolutely disastrously wasting the best group of ELC talent in the league.

Babs and Lou inherited a bottom place team and began their rebuild. Is your position that they should have carved out a cup window of year 2 to 4?

Improving the D by moving 1st round picks and top shelf prospects and signing big contracts for 30 year old defenceman wouldn't have made sense for Lou at the time and would look pretty bad right now next to JT.

 

[zeke]

Babs and Lou inherited a bottom place team and began their rebuild. Is your position that they should have carved out a cup window of year 2 to 4?

Improving the D by moving 1st round picks and top shelf prospects and signing big contracts for 30 year old defenceman wouldn't have made sense for Lou at the time and would look pretty bad right now next to JT.

Babs and Lou inherited the best group of ELC talent in hockey, and completely, utterly, wasted it.

 

[Dekes For Days]

The only problem with the hypothesis that Dubas was screwed by the flat cap is that players seem to want a % of the cap when they negotiate.

They negotiate for a percentage of the cap at time of signing, but except during this global pandemic and resulting stagnant cap that occurred right after all of our signings, the percentage of the cap they take up drops as the cap rises throughout their contract. We didn't get this benefit with all of our players that pretty much everybody else has got throughout the cap era. For example, Tavares signed for 13.84%, but if the cap had risen as it was projected to, he'd be sitting at about 12% of the current cap right now.

You don't think that giving JT $11M had anything to do with the young guns asking for the moon?

The young guns asked for what they were worth, not for "the moon", and the Tavares contract had absolutely nothing to do with anything - he was a UFA contract and not a comparable for a post-ELC contract.

I do know that If we kept Lou just until all the deals were done with the kids and THEN handed the reigns off to Dubas we would be in a much better spot.

You do not know that. Actually, all signs point to us being in a much, much worse spot, based on how Lou historically handles the type of situation we had.

I didn't like a lot of stuff that Lou did..but I guarantee you they would not have signed those deals had he been around.

He would have signed those deals, or he would have lost the players, and we'd be infinitely worse off. This fantasy of Lou signing them to better contracts is just so wildly unrealistic.

 

[Racer88]

When Lou was fired the team was a minimum of three years away from their five year window to contend, assuming the core five were as good as advertised.
The plan should have been to keep developing, drafting, acquiring, evaluating and signing the worthy RFAs to long term contracts.

Instead, Dubas did what he did. Now the plan is hope.

Don’t forget Luck……the plan is now hope and luck

 

[Dreakmur]

Also it didn’t box us in, Dubas’ decisions after signing that contract boxed us in. We still had a shit ton of cap space to play with even after signing Tavares, that’s what made signing Tavares so appealing because even with him signed they had all this money to build a solid team around him. Dubas’ next steps with that free money is what boxed us in. He decided instead of spreading the wealth among all the young players for a short period of time, let’s give big money to 3 of our young guys and then we’ll get rid of the other young guys who we can’t afford (again rookie mistake). He should have done everything possible to convince them to take a bridge and keep that young core that graduated together, a team (Nylander, Hyman, Kapanen, Brown, Johnansson, Engvall, Marner, Matthews) but he CHOSE not to.

Once you sign Tavares and the RFAs are better than him, he’s the contract they can point to and say I want that much.

 

[hotpaws]

The end goal is to hopefully contribute to people saying less dumb things. I realize the odds of that happening is essentially 0, but I felt compelled nonetheless. And to be perfectly clear, while a number of people are acknowledging luck is an ever-present factor, it was you who grossly misrepresented SeaOfBlue's post as implying winning is "all" based on luck. Like you literally just misrepresented your own misrepresentation.

Indeed it has. So wouldn't it be nice to actually understand why we failed so we can avoid failure in the future?

How do you differentiate between an excuse and a legitimate reason?

I never implied it was "all luck'' , that's something you made up to try to have a reason why my response to a another poster seems to have upset you .

I agree we need to understand why we failed so we can avoid it in the future but how can we avoid having the ''bad luck'' element you keep stating as being partly responsible for our loss ?

It's been 4 years of first rd losses under the current GM and 2 of them against mediocre opponents so it's easy to see that your argument is just another excuse and not a legitimate reason .

now if you want to discuss improving the team then there's zero reason to discuss how much ''luck'' is involved into winning the cup

 

[ShaneFalco]

Don’t forget Luck……the plan is now hope and luck

And that Dubas has learned from his mistakes

 

[Mess]

f***! It is here! Perfect formula, your genius! Now we just acquire Yzerman from Detroit and send him this message and tell him to execute!

I think most of the championship teams are build around their strengths that come from the composition of their top players. 10% of teams get Vezina level goaltending and 90% are screwed and same goes with those Norrisesque defenders. You can't just pick them or trade Marner for them. You could trade Matthews for them, but then we would be enviously here commenting that "You need 6'4" Selke center that is scoring 60 goals to win the cup".

If this would be this easy I think there would be way more top teams in the league. If you draft "Vasilevsky" of the draft every year for 20 years you get maybe 2 of those Vezina level goaltenders. Same with defenders.

It is problematic that we have our top players in the offense, but it isn't just dumping one of them and getting another 10 mil player back. During our build there have been two elite players available as UFAs Tavares and Pietrangelo, other than that it's gamble every time and it was also with those two.

We have top players to build around, it isn't given situation in this league even if you have top5 pick every year. Trade one away if you will, but then you have to SURE to utilize that cap space more effectively. We have acquired core pieces like Muzzin, Brodie etc. every year despite of those contracts. We have missed on Pietrangelo, but you can't trust your build around saving cap space for that situation to present itself, because it usually doesn't happen.

In that reality Shanahan and our staff work. Not in the wonderland of Willy Wonka.

Tavares was optional not mandatory and it was his record setting contract at the time of $11 mil that set up Leafs internal pay-scale to escalate the ELC contracts of Leafs own players up to his. The moment the Leafs signed JT I said it was going to act as magnet and draw AM and MM salaries up to his.

This was a self inflicted wound, not simply the hand the Leafs GM was dealt here, as his name is on all 4 of those contracts that add up to 1/2 the teams Salary Cap.

In a Salary Cap World, under Dubas' plan the Leafs are trying to win a Cup while having 3 of the 7 highest cap hit AAV players all making $11 mil on the same team. The results show Dubas is 0-4 for even winning a single playoff round and now the Leafs hold the distinction of the ONLY NHL team (other than expansion Seattle) to fail to win a single playoff round since the Cap was instituted in 2005. That points a finger directly at Salary Cap mismanagement, and just because Toronto has the money they appear to spending Harder and not Smarter. IMO

I showed you that TB who are building a dynasty (successful team building formula) going for 3 Cups in a row, have a Vezina goalie and Norris Dman includied in their same Cap consumption as Leafs 4 forwards. for $40 mil. That goalie and that Dman also won the Conn Smythe playoff MVP trophies, and despite significant contribution from the forwards (Kuch leading the playoffs in points, and Point the payoff in goals) it was not the main reason they won, because "Defense wins Championships".

#1G + #1D + 3 X Top line forwards >>>>> 4 X top line forwards for approxmately 1/2 your cap consumption is 2 very different team building strategies.

 

[Dekes For Days]

It was a choice. He did not need Tavares when he had 3 young forward stars in the line up.

Signing Tavares was a choice, and a good one based on available information at the time, especially with our organizational weakness at center, but having those four players take up just under 50% of the cap was not a choice. That was brought on by an unexpected global pandemic stagnating the cap.

yes while it is true that spending big money on goaltending is not a guarantee of great performance im betting the odds are better then bargain basement guys

Again, we haven't been using "bargain basement" guys. We've been using quality NHL goaltenders - just not superstar goaltenders. And that's because there are only a handful of superstar goalies in the league, and they are rarely if ever moved around. And outside of those handful of superstar goalies, I'm not sure there actually is better odds from higher paid guys.

 

[Stephen]

f***! It is here! Perfect formula, your genius! Now we just acquire Yzerman from Detroit and send him this message and tell him to execute!

I think most of the championship teams are build around their strengths that come from the composition of their top players. 10% of teams get Vezina level goaltending and 90% are screwed and same goes with those Norrisesque defenders. You can't just pick them or trade Marner for them. You could trade Matthews for them, but then we would be enviously here commenting that "You need 6'4" Selke center that is scoring 60 goals to win the cup".

If this would be this easy I think there would be way more top teams in the league. If you draft "Vasilevsky" of the draft every year for 20 years you get maybe 2 of those Vezina level goaltenders. Same with defenders.

It is problematic that we have our top players in the offense, but it isn't just dumping one of them and getting another 10 mil player back. During our build there have been two elite players available as UFAs Tavares and Pietrangelo, other than that it's gamble every time and it was also with those two.

We have top players to build around, it isn't given situation in this league even if you have top5 pick every year. Trade one away if you will, but then you have to SURE to utilize that cap space more effectively. We have acquired core pieces like Muzzin, Brodie etc. every year despite of those contracts. We have missed on Pietrangelo, but you can't trust your build around saving cap space for that situation to present itself, because it usually doesn't happen.

In that reality Shanahan and our staff work. Not in the wonderland of Willy Wonka.

I agree with you in the sense that you make the best of what you’re given and throwing cash at Tavares represented one aggressive way to dramatically get better in a short amount of time. But it was clearly a flashy deal over methodical building.

Over time I guess the hindsight takeaway is he’s not quite the best fit for their vision of how they want to play, but it’s also on the organization for having not correctly identified the type of line mates he needs to be optimized, and the fact they’ve prioritized Matthews and Marner over what worked well in 2018-19.

 

[Dekes For Days]

Tavares was optional not mandatory and it was his record setting contract at the time of $11 mil that set up Leafs internal pay-scale to escalate the ELC contracts of Leafs own players up to his.

Tavares' contract was not "record setting" in any way, and UFA contracts have absolutely nothing to do with post-ELC contracts.

 

[ACC1224]

Once you sign Tavares and the RFAs are better than him, he’s the contract they can point to and say I want that much.

Yep, once he started caving it's all gone sideways.
No one would deny a more experienced GM certainly would have handled it better but here we are. Live and learn I guess.

 

[Dekes For Days]

Do people that post this nonsense forget we had one of the most experienced coaches and GMs working and failing together?

Or that the back-to-back Cup champs are GMed and coached by rookies.

 

[Nineteen67]

Yep, once he started caving it's all gone sideways.
No one would deny a more experienced GM certainly would have handled it better but here we are. Live and learn I guess.

If they can‘t sign a goalie this off season, missing the playoffs is not unrealistic.

 

[Nineteen67]

Tavares' contract was not "record setting" in any way, and UFA contracts have absolutely nothing to do with post-ELC contracts.

What? A Player agent said the opposite on Leafs Lunch.

 

[ACC1224]

If they can‘t sign a goalie this off season, missing the playoffs is not unrealistic.

Hate to see that happen. I do think the best thing for this team long term is to struggle out of the gate and Keefe is replaced.

 

[notbias]

What? A Player agent said the opposite on Leafs Lunch.

maybe because he switched teams? Other than that, it isn't.

Seguin, Barkov, Kopitar, Toews, Malkin, Getzlaf, Benn, Kane, Kessel, Perry, and Panarin, all signed similar deals, some were a higher cap hit percentage, some were lower