Toronto Star Referrer

Dubas remains confident with core

KEVIN MCGRAN

The Maple Leafs appear to be in an endless loop: Have a great regular season, lose in the first round of the playoffs, face a summertime salarycap crunch. It is GM Kyle Dubas’s job to get this team out of that loop.

But there were no fresh ideas coming out of Dubas’s end-of-season media availability. The way forward looks awfully similar to the journey that brought them to their sixth straight playoff appearance, and their sixth straight first-round defeat.

“If there’s a way that we can improve the team and become a better team, then we’ll do that,” Dubas said Tuesday. “I don’t think that we want to start just making changes that may be lateral or make us inferior as a team, just to say that we changed something.

“I do believe in the group.”

It’s not like Dubas would ever tip his hand regarding any move he was planning. But he has said all these things before, and remained true to his word. So there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of his belief.

Dubas’s source of hope continues to be the team’s young and maturing stars. He mentioned that 24year-old Auston Matthews, 25year-old Mitch Marner and 26year-old William Nylander are coming off career years.

“It’s still a young group,” Dubas said. “And they’re going to continue to get better.”

The Leafs have seven players earning more than $5 million (U.S.) and the big-money players are coming back. It’s the support group where there will be change.

It will be fiscally impossible to resign all the pending unrestricted free agents — including defencemen Mark Giordano and Ilya Lyubushkin and forwards Colin Blackwell, Ilya Mikheyev and Jason Spezza— as well as pending restricted free-agent forwards Pierre Engvall and Ondrej Kaše and defencemen Timothy Liljegren and Rasmus Sandin.

Those players — many of whom will be looking for raises — already take up about $13 million in salary cap space. As the roster is currently constructed, Dubas will have about $10 million to $12 million to work with, even with the cap going up to $82.5 million next season.

“It falls on me to continue to find the right pieces to go around the group, to improve it, to push us ahead, continue to adapt my approach, work with our management team, adapt our approach and find the right pieces that can continue to push ahead,” Dubas said.

If there is a bright spot to the approach, it’s that the Leafs professional scouting team has done an admirable job of finding important pieces at bargain-basement prices. Michael Bunting is a rookie-of-theyear candidate and is under contract for next season at $950,000 a year. David Kämpf, who emerged as a shutdown centre with some offence, has another year left on his contract at $1.5 million. They got a decent year out of Kaše before injuries befell him once again.

“We need to replicate in most regards the way that we operated last summer and going out and being able to find players that can come in and add to our group and do so at not a very high cost,” Dubas said.

But mistakes — like giving Nick Ritchie $5 million over two years, and Petr Mrazek $11.4 million over three — can’t be replicated. Dubas moved quickly to fix the Ritchie error, trading him for Lyubushkin. But the Mrazek contract could get in the way of re-signing Campbell, the most important goalie in the Leafs system.

There could be some wiggle room to help the tinker-around-the-edges approach. A buyer for Mrazek would help, as would a determination on the futures of Justin Holl ($2 million a year) and Alex Kerfoot ($3.5 million).

If the team decides to re-sign Giordano, who expressed a desire to come back and could be one of the few to take a pay cut, then perhaps Sandin becomes trade bait since there’ll be very little room for him to grow as a left-side defenceman.

Dubas expects some of the help will come from the club’s prospects. Marlies forwards Nick Robertson and Alex Steeves had cameos with the Leafs this season and could have a future as high as the second line. And Dubas suggested some depth forwards from the Marlies — Curtis Douglas, Joey Anderson and Bobby McMann — would get opportunities at training camp.

The window for the Leafs is getting smaller. Matthews and Nylander are under contract for just two more seasons. Both will be eligible to sign extensions by July 1, 2023, or signal their intention of testing free agency in 2024. That really means the team knows it only has one season to put it all together perhaps before it all comes apart as a kind of doomsday clock starts to tick.

“I certainly don’t view it as a doomsday clock,” said Dubas, turning his attention to Matthews. “We’re fortunate to have one of the best players in hockey under contract for two more years. Beyond that, he’s a great player that we’d like to see play his whole career with Toronto. He wants to win more than anybody.”

It’s still a young group. And they’re going to continue to get better.

KYLE DUBAS LEAFS GM

SPORTS

en-ca

2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-18T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thestarepaper.pressreader.com/article/281887301913441

Toronto Star Newspapers Limited