On September 12, 2020, it was announced that the New York Islanders general manager, Lou Lamoriello, former GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs, had won the Jim Gregory award for General Manager of the Year. Much like any time the Islanders scored on or had beaten the Washington Capitals, Philadelphia Flyers, or Tampa Bay Lightning on the road to the Eastern Conference Final, my dad was quick to let me know. His incessant reminders of Lamoriello and the Islanders’ successes prompted some inner dialogue. Should Leaf fans care? Although a lifelong Leafs fan, the words I write come from an objective standpoint. I was overjoyed with Lamoriello’s hire in 2015, but I was also very pleased to see him make way for rookie GM Kyle Dubas. Despite Lamoriello’s success, the Leafs made the right move by letting the Hall of Fame GM walk, and fans should not lose any sleep over his most recent award.
Lamoriello, for the most part, helped turn the Leafs around after years of incompetence, and there’s something to be said about that. He locked down both Morgan Rielly and Nazem Kadri to excellent, team-friendly, long-term deals at $5-million and $4.5-million AAV (average annual value), respectively. In addition to these deals, he managed to sign hometown favourite, Zach Hyman, to a fair, respectable $2.25-million AAV for four years. But Lamoriello, like every other NHL GM, is not perfect. There were some painful signings (Nikita Zaitsev’s seven year, $4.5-million AAV deal comes to mind), some high-risk, low-reward trades (see Byron Froese and a second-round pick for half a season and one playoff round of Brian Boyle) and many squandered draft picks (Yegor Korshkov at 31st overall in 2016).
In 2018, the direction of the Leafs on the ice demanded a change at the executive level. It was time to move beyond the big and brash and opt, instead, for the vision that Maple Leafs President Brendan Shanahan believed in: fast, skilled players who had the puck on their sticks more often than not. Despite the Islanders’ bubble success, these qualities were never Lamoriello-esque, and his current team is a solid example.
The analysis of Lamoriello’s tenure with the Maple Leafs is not one stemming from the benefits of hindsight. The Zaitsev contract was avoidable. Emptying the prospect pool for pie-in-the-sky solutions was avoidable. Wasting relatively high draft picks on the biggest body available was avoidable. Lamoriello’s actions, as the Leafs GM, made it clear he had a philosophy he sought to realize. To me, this philosophy is short-sighted and its success is extremely challenging to sustain. When Lamoriello left the organization, the Leafs had finally gained some stability as a good, young team. I don’t doubt that letting Lamoriello stick around would have led to instability and finding ourselves back at square one.
Under Dubas’s tenure, the current Maple Leafs have their own problems to sort out. As much as the Damien Cox and Steve Simmons of the world love shouting anti-Dubas, pro-Lamoriello rhetoric until they are blue in the face, Dubas has spent a massive chunk of his time as Leafs GM fixing Lamoriello’s misses. Last summer, the Leafs traded away their first-round pick to the Carolina Hurricanes in order to shed the third year of the contract Lamoriello gave to ageing winger Patrick Marleau. I believe this was the only real option, and I refuse to think other teams were out there willing to eat all of Marleau’s $6.25-million cap hit for something less after he looked cooked in his final year in the blue and white. One year of Cody Ceci was the pain Leaf fans had to endure to escape Lamoriello’s Zaitsev deal. The list goes on.
Lou Lamoriello’s GM of the Year Award should be a non-issue to Leafs fans, yet here we are talking about it. At the end of the day, Lamoriello was an excellent mentor to Dubas. In peak Lamoriello fashion, the Leafs remain tight-lipped about their next moves and are always looking for creative ways to circumvent the league rules and the salary cap. But the Leafs were designed to be something very different than Lamoriello’s usual teams. Under the old guard, we knew what we would get and it’s not difficult to envision a middle of the pack Maple Leafs team that struggled to generate much offensively. Under the new regime, Dubas finally has the ability to run the team the way he, Shanahan, and head coach Sheldon Keefe envision – built on skill, speed and possession-based hockey. It’s now on them to take this team to the next level. As much as people like to think, Lamoriello’s success in Long Island does not guarantee any such success would have been enjoyed under his guidance in Toronto. No such award should make Leaf fans wish they had something they no longer have.