NHL GMS on hot seat deserve more wiggle room

If the Toronto Maple Leafs fail to advance past the qualifying round, does GM Kyle Dubas deserve to lose his job?

A few months ago, before the coronavirus prematurely ended the regular season, this question didn’t exist. Or, it existed differently.

After three straight firstround losses, the pressure was on the Leafs to get over the hump. They needed to win a series. They needed to slay the Boston Bruins or the Tampa Bay Lightning. Maybe both.

If not, then Dubas, who fired head coach Mike Babcock earlier in the year and made Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner and John Tavares three of the richest players in the league, was going to get criticized again for building a team that placed too much emphasis on skill at a time of the year when the games were physical.

Now, with a best- of- five series against the Columbus Blue Jackets standing in the way of the actual playoffs, the Leafs have to get over another hump just to reach that first hump.

In other words, winning the Stanley Cup just got harder with 24 teams now in the mix.

Regardless of what happens, I’m giving the Leafs GM a free pass.

The same goes for every other general manager who finds himself in this Hunger Games- type post- season, where the odds are certainly not in anyone’s favour.

In any other scenario, the seventh- best team in the league should always beat the 24th best team in a bestof-five series. But how many will actually be surprised if Montreal ends up eliminating Pittsburgh? How many would call it an upset?

Would you blame the Edmonton Oilers if they lost to a veteran group like the Chicago Blackhawks? What happens if Boston loses all of its games in the round robin portion and the Presidents’ Trophy winners, who were the only team to reach 100 points, ends up as the fourth seed?

Is the winner of the Stanley Cup already in danger of having an asterisk attached to it?

“It is unique,” Dubas said in a conference call on Wednesday. “I think we’re certainly going to embrace it as a unique experience, but also as a tremendous opportunity for our team and for our group.”

Unique is one way to describe a post- season that is going to be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. By the time the NHL gets to Phase 4 of its Return to Play plan, more than four months will have passed since the last regular season game was played. As with anyone who hasn’t visited a hairdresser during that time, teams are going to look vastly different than the last time we saw them.

The Blue Jackets had the eighth- most points in the Eastern Conference when the season was put on pause. Of course, they were also walking around on crutches for most of the season, having missed a leaguehigh 419 man- games to injury. Time heals all wounds. And according to GM Jarmo Kekalainen, all of their players — Seth Jones, Oliver Bjorkstrand, Cam Atkinson, Joonas Korpisalo and even Josh Anderson — should be healthy and ready to go.

That’s bad news for the Leafs.

But it’s not even the health of players that throws a wrinkle into the post-season.

Everything is different under this format. There won’t be any home- ice advantage. There won’t be fans in the building to rally behind or to quiet down. There will be outside fears of contracting COVID- 19. Will the round robin that the top- four seeds in each conference have to play actually prepare them for the intensity of the first round of the playoffs? Or will it be just another chance for players to get hurt?

No one knows.

“I think there are going to be a lot of interesting results in this qualifying round,” said Dubas, “just given the nature of things and the delay between when teams last played and different changes to the roster in that meantime, in terms of health and guys and different guys who had surgeries who are now out, various things of that nature.”

We don’t even know what shape the players — even the ones who had been healthy — will look like when hockey returns. Have all the players been working out or rollerblading? This will essentially be October hockey because of the long layoff, but it will be played at an intensity of springtime hockey. Good luck for anyone over age 35 in getting up to speed.

“I think the league did a very good job in putting together a format that sort of kept all the teams that were somewhat at least in proximity to being able to compete for a regular Stanley Cup playoff spot and teams that basically had no chance or zero chance to get there are eliminated now,” Kekalainen said in a conference call.

“It’s a good job by the league. There’s going to be some interesting matchups, and the Leafs, we certainly know that they’re a very talented team. We’ll prepare accordingly. I think it will be a great matchup.

“There’s plenty of them around the league, even in the first play- in round. It’s going to be very interesting.”

Interesting, sure. Just don’t make any snap judgments once it’s over.