Every player that leaves Toronto finds success. Kessel 2 cups. Dion ECF appearance. Bozak cup. Polak playing for a better team. Kadri playing for a better team. JVR playing with a better team. Marleau playing with a better team. Mcbackup playing with a better team. What does that tell you about this organization?
A few things. But it also informs that our market bears partial weight for making this place a seemingly impossible place to succeed in as a Toronto Maple Leaf. Top level coaching, championship GMs, elite executive staff, resources to rival any organization...And yet, our media and fans that (allegedly) make this a great place to play, also make it unbearable. And it most of it boils down to a hyper vigilance found in groups whose agenda it is to insure that target groups are perpetually kept caricatured as deficient. Excluding of course the exception of professional sports' entailment of competition. But that doesn't matter, right? It's the Leafs. The Laffs. The narrative that must not be allowed to die.
And now with this illusory news cycle and the sense of constantly compressing time and attention spans, what was once an obsessed hockey market has and will continue to become an obsessed hockey market defined and concerned only with justifying it's insatiable want to be right about the Leafs always being wrong.
I'm generally a half glass full fan, but the schizophrenic nature of our fan base and the tension imposed on our young core that's exacerbated by media, professional and amateur alike has me concerned that if this group is run out of town, we are never going to get another chance at contention building like the one we have now.
This group is about winning the Cup in it's due time. Absolutely. It's also about building a culture. To think that we can continually shuffle and improve is akin to believing you can put down roots by constantly moving. And that's what Shanahan and Dubas hinted at in their post-trade deadline interviews. At some point, the answer has to come from within even when everything without claims to know the solution to the problem as located outside of the resolve of the players already in blue and white.
You know, every example you cite to mar Dubas' short tenure wasn't a Dubas acquisition. And every remedy to every Lamoriello solution yielded younger assets or the means and space to acquire/target younger assets. That's a common denominator if your intent is the long game. In some instances painful, perhaps over-exuberant (i.e. McElhinney) even if reasonable. Contrast that with Lamoriello and what you have is the dull work of a GM trying to actually build long term success. That's obvious if you pause for a moment and examine the information.
Perhaps the better question is, what do those other organizations do differently so that by the time they attract key pieces, they are ready for a Cup run? Unfashionable, long term moves that forecast a longer timeline than most desire. Because the line to the Cup isn't going to be constantly ascending. I'm on record here repeatedly pointing out the NEED in learning to win through defeat. Which means, a first round exit one year, a second the year after and maybe a first round exit the following. That type of frustrating development. But it has PRECEDENT. And our management group understands, what other successful groups do, that in order to have a culture of contention, you have to be able to do so year after year.
So one thing that I glean by the examples listed, is that our present management has enough sense to determine it's core assets according to a longer game than previous administrations. And that eventually, a Kessel, Marleau, Kadri, McBackup, will eventually join our developed, grizzled core to compliment it appropriately, rather than preemptively define it in the fashion other Leafs management groups have.
I'd like to think by the end of it all, the thankless work Dubas is doing will be seen as clearly as Nylander's production hiccup. In context with easily verifiable facts accessible to anyone that's remotely concerned with reasonable scenarios.
But when Roman Polak is used as a dagger...Well, reason's of no concern I suppose.