Pittsburgh Penguins president and general manager Kyle Dubas can still recall his final days as general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Maple Leafs were just coming off their first trip to the second round since 2004. They had eliminated the Tampa Bay Lightning in six games before fizzling out to the Florida Panthers in five. It was a playoff that had plenty of Toronto fans excited, however, it wasn’t the same in the Maple Leafs’ front office.
Playing in Toronto comes with an everlasting spotlight on you, whether a player, coach, or, in Dubas’ case, the GM. Dubas also didn’t have a contract for the next season, so there was a lot of stress with everything that transpired.
And when he was asked if he still had it in him to be the GM of the Maple Leafs, he was honest.
“What I would say to that is, that I think it requires me to have a full family discussion. My family is a hugely important part of what I do, so for me to commit to anything without having a fuller understanding of what this year took on them, is probably unfair for me to answer where I’m at,” Dubas said on May 15, 2023, in his end-of-season media availability.
“What I would say is I definitely don’t have it in me to go anywhere else, so it’ll either be here, or it’ll be taking time to recalibrate, reflect on the seasons here. But you won’t see me next week pop up elsewhere. I can’t put them through that after this year.”
Four days after speaking with the media, Dubas was relieved of his duties by then-Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan. Dubas took a job as the President of Hockey Operations with the Penguins a month later.
The 39-year-old appeared on The Cam & Strick Podcast with former NHLer Cam Janssen and Andy Strickland to discuss his time with the Penguins. Dubas also looked back on his tenure in Toronto and that specific moment with the Maple Leafs, which led to his firing.
He admitted to Janssen and Strickland that he wasn’t ready to move on from the Maple Leafs.
“I think it’s just, I was asked a question, I was very honest about it on that day. It had been a lot. We lost on Friday to Florida. During that year, it’s strange to say, but one of my biggest fears was that, we hadn’t won a round yet. One of my biggest fears going into it was—and you have to think this way as a GM at times—if we won, we were going to have a letdown,” Dubas said.
“Our goal wasn’t to win a round, our goal was to win the Stanley Cup. And so, we went into the series against Florida, [Sergei] Bobrovsky played great, there was three overtime games, we won one, we lost two of the others. They were coming off beating the Bruins and we lost the series in overtime at home on the Friday night. The Sunday we did our team photo, and then Monday, we did exit meetings, the full day, and they were long, and after that, there was media.
“They kind of said, well maybe you shouldn’t do media today, and I just felt like it would be cowardly having lost again, disappointed, to not go up on the same day as the players and the coaches had gone to answer, and I didn’t want to [not speak with the media]. So I did that and when asked about what my mindset was—obviously the contract was a major factor—that’s how I felt that day.”
Dubas said that he spoke with his wife over that weekend and decided that if he doesn’t remain in Toronto, he would be taking a break.
“If you had asked me the day after being fired by the Leafs, if I was going to do anything, I would’ve bet you everything I had that I would probably just take a few months and recharge and see what other things came up,” he said.
“But as it went on, and visiting Pittsburgh and getting a sense of what the community was like and the commitment of Fenway Sports and so on and so forth, we just decided as a family that this was best for our family and best to just keep rolling.”
Dubas has been the president and GM of the Penguins ever since, and although it might not have been the departure from Toronto that he wanted, there were lessons learned from the experience that he’ll have with him forever.
“I know a lot gets played into it, but it’s easy for other people, but when they don’t live it, when they don’t have to go through it and they don’t have responsibilities to their family, I think it’s easy to say, ‘Well, you said this now.’” he said.
“The lesson to me was, I think people want you to be honest when you answer all the time, and they criticize you when you aren’t honest, but when you’re honest and then the situation changes, they kind of point back and say aha, like he was trying to deceive us. But that’s just the way it went down.”
This article originally appeared on The Hockey News:
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