Kyle Dubas Is Not an Analytics GM, and His Failures Don’t Define the Movement

Let’s hold him to the same standard as John Chayka…

The Toronto Maple Leafs have just been eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs by the Montreal Canadiens. It marks the 3rd straight year since inheriting a 105-point Maple Leaf team that General Manager (GM) Kyle Dubas has seen them fail to win a single playoff series. It’s the second straight in which he’s seen them eliminated by a team that finished the regular season with a negative goal differential.

These numbers alone paint an unflattering picture of how good Dubas’s Leafs have actually been. They generally controlled the flow of play in the series they lost to Columbus and Montreal — the two teams with the negative goal differential — and were unfortunate to run into a couple of hot goalies and suffer injuries to a few key players in Jake Muzzin and John Tavares. And more importantly, when you take a look at a larger sample, like the aggregate of the 3 regular seasons since Dubas took over, the Leafs rank 8th out of 31 teams in points percentage with a mark of .620%, which rounds up to 102 points per 82 games. They’ve indisputably been a very good team since he took over.

They also haven’t been good enough. The expectation for Dubas’s Maple Leafs was that they’d become an elite team and a perennial contender for the Stanley Cup. In the summer of 2018, if you told Maple Leafs fans that over the next three seasons, their team would play at…