bustaheims said:
CarltonTheBear said:
Bender said:
I mean, I've also read most of this thread and who would be the obvious replacement? I don't even know.
Eric Tulsky, the brains behind the Hurricanes for the last few years, reportedly interviewed for the Penguins GM job. I imagine he'd be a strong candidate for the Leafs if it came to that.
Or a promotion for Pridham. GM options are usually harder to identify than head coach options, because AGMs and other highly qualified guys aren't in the spotlight in the same way. A lot of the top candidates fly under the radar until they start getting interviews.
Just to expand on what Carlton just said while I was typing all this: General Manager really needs to be a generalist, specializing in managing rather than any one departmental facet. You can see it in businesses that fall apart after they anoint a engineer or top sales associate, or in the case of hockey the top scout or analytics guy, to run the business as a whole. If they don't know how to schmooze and empower their collaborators, then the organization really just embodies the weaknesses of that one person.
Now this is not to say Tulsky would not be good: he has clearly developed a good relationship with the hockey guys and the owner and expanded his team effectively. And I don't know anything of Pridham other than he helped write the CBA, knows his cap mechanics, and got hit by a car. Some people are more effective staying in the AGM lane.
Through that lens, you can see how lucky the Leafs have been with Dubas. He's good at a lot of things, but his key power is finding experts, empowering them as they prove themselves, crediting them by name as often as possible, and blocking or straight up eating whatever feces the media throws back. He is honest, logical, emotionally available, and treats people as actual people.