During Mitch Marner’s rookie season with the Toronto Maple Leafs, then-head coach Mike Babcock asked the player to rank his teammates in an incident that has since been dubbed "the list". It wasn’t until Babcock was relieved as head coach of the Leafs in November of 2019 that details of what transpired became public in a report by the Toronto Sun.
It turns out the circle of people who knew was even tighter than that.
Lou Lamoriello became the Leafs' general manager in 2015, just a couple of months after Babcock was hired as head coach. During an appearance on the Cam & Strick podcast this week, Kyle Dubas revealed that even though he had been assistant GM when the incident occurred, and later went on to become the team’s GM, he had no idea that it had happened.
"Lou (Lamoriello) was the GM at the time. So as you guys would probably know, nobody else with the team really knew that," Dubas said. "So Lou handled it with Mike, and the fact that it never was a topic again until literally, I think a few days after Mike was fired in 2019, speaks to Lou's ability to handle everything."
"It never came up again in my time there. When I read the story, I remember (Brandon Pridham) and I saying, 'We didn't know that had happened'."
Despite how things ended with Babcock in Toronto and his failed attempt to restart his coaching career with the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2023, Dubas gave the former head coach credit for getting the most out of his core players in the early years in Toronto.
“He brought in a tremendous amount of accountability, a tremendous amount of detail, and his work ethic and what he was willing to put in to be prepared was unlike anything,” Dubas said. “I still haven't seen anything quite like it. He was very crystal clear on what the team was going to have to endure in 2015-16. We weren't a good team, we ended up picking last, but I thought compared to my first year with the Leafs, we played hard, we were extraordinarily prepared each night. The work ethic was never a question, and it was enjoyable to watch a team play, especially when we brought the younger guys up at the end of the year. And then the next year, the team was a playoff team, and they've been a playoff team ever since. So I think he deserves a lot of the credit for that because he did a great job getting the team to that point and allowing the team to get to that place so quickly in 2016-17.” — Dubas on Babcock's impact via the Cam & Strick podcast.
Babcock and the Blue Jackets parted ways just weeks before the club was set to embark on their first year after an episode of the Spittin’ Chiclets podcast revealed that Babcock was asking players if he could go through pictures on their phones.
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