The Pittsburgh Penguins under Kyle Dubas and the Toronto Maple Leafs under Brendan Shanahan will be judged against each other for years to come, says Adam Proteau.
It probably wasn’t an accident that the Pittsburgh Penguins announced Thursday morning they were hiring former Toronto Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas as their new president of hockey operations – literally at the same time as the Leafs were introducing former Flames head honcho Brad Treliving as their new GM.
If you needed any evidence that a new kind of rivalry between the Pens and Buds is just starting to develop, you had it right away as both teams charted new grounds for their future.
To say the moves involving the two teams will be put under a microscope is an understatement. Now that the new lines have been drawn, with Dubas holding the reins of power in Pittsburgh and Leafs team president Brendan Shanahan bringing in Treliving in Toronto, every off-ice move – and possibly, a few on-ice moves – will get all kinds of attention.
You have to remember the NHL has no salary cap for team management figures. Any team can spend as much or as little as it wants on a GM, a head scout, player development people and any other member of management. This is how ownership can have a direct role in their team’s odds of success.
Clearly, Maple Leafs ownership has gone to great lengths to hire the best people they can find and figure out exact roles and responsibilities as time goes on. And now, the Penguins’ new-ish owner, Fenway Sports Group, is going to have all its maneuvers in the spotlight.
For instance, would Leafs AGM Brandon Pridham see a new challenge if Pittsburgh offered him more say in hockey decisions and the same amount of money he’s making in Toronto at the moment? What about Wes Clark, the Leafs’ current director of amateur scouting? How many of Toronto’s management members feel a sense of loyalty to Dubas rather than the team? Time will tell soon enough.
Meanwhile, although Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe appears to be safe as Treliving settles into the job, it’s very easy to see a situation where (a) Toronto goes through a tough stretch in the regular-season and fires Keefe; (b) the Penguins also struggle and part ways with current coach Mike Sullivan; and (c) Dubas and Keefe are reunited in Pittsburgh. Dubas and Keefe have won an AHL championship together, and they’ve worked together on a successful regular-season team in Toronto of late. There’s no question they could be on the same team again.
You’re not going to see Shanahan and Dubas put each other down, in public or in private. They’re both classy people. But they’re both going to be driven to beat the other guy more than they might be driven to beat any other team in the league. That competitiveness that bound them together for most of the past decade is now going to be used as a spearhead against one another.
We probably won’t have a clear victor in the new-era Pens versus Leafs rivalry, but we will find out many things about both sides in the coming weeks and the off-season in general – namely, how much does Toronto want to hold onto the current management structure now that Treliving is on board?
Treliving will undoubtedly want to bring in some people he inherently trusts, but the percentage of those who stay on with the Leafs versus that of the Leafs team that will jump to the Penguins will be worth paying attention to.
Dubas is joining a team with an even more veteran core than the one he left in Toronto. How much economic power is Fenway going to give him on the management side? For some Leafs personnel, there will be the attraction of not working in a hockey fishbowl like Toronto that lures them to Pittsburgh. But others will want to finish the job they started with the Leafs. This is where interpersonal relationships make a ton of difference in how teams perform in the standings.
Toronto and Pittsburgh don’t play in the same division, and they don’t really have a wealth of history of hating each other. That’s likely about to change now that Dubas works for the Penguins and Shanahan still works for the Leafs. They’ll be judged against each other, and they’ll have every opportunity to prove their vision for a Stanley Cup winner was the right vision.