On a day where everyone least expected it, the Toronto Maple Leafs made a move that could very well be the most important and significant one of the off-season.

Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan is a sneaky man. When he inherited the team a few months ago, he stressed patience. Today, he added a young hockey mind that has the potential to help aid the Leafs in more ways than one. In today’s NHL, analytics and specific hockey statistics have come a long way in truly outlying a team’s success. Corsi stats and Fenwick percentage are the two that have been talked about for some time now, and the good hockey teams have people who spend time analyzing and looking at specific players who can help bring these stats to life.

Years ago, hockey wasn’t like this. No one cared about advanced stats because the game was considered “old school.” In today’s game however, that has all changed.

The times they are a changin.’

And finally, the Maple Leafs seem to be getting the message. It only took a few years but they seem to be on the right path. The hiring of 28-year-old Kyle Dubas proves that. The firinga of assistant GM's Claude Loiselle and Dave Poulin, who were left from the Brian Burke days, also proves that.

Poulin and Loiselle, for whatever reason, didn’t see this move coming and were surprised at their dismissal. For a while, they didn’t understand many things one being the most important: why the Leafs struggled so much down the stretch. They stressed that it wasn’t internal and that while changes needed to be made, their overall outlook on the game and players was not flawed.

Unfortunately, this was proven as Toronto lost their last 12 out of 14 games, missing the playoffs in disarterdly fashion. This meant that getting heavily outshot, and leaning on strong goal tending, is not how you win hockey games. To sum it all up, the bad play and running out of luck caught up to them.

Brendan Shanahan has officially put his stamp on the team. Looking at the moves as a whole, this off-season for Toronto has been positive. From firing all of Randy Carlyle’s assistant coaches (even though they retained him), drafting William Nylander, not re-signing Dave Bolland (although he said they wanted too) to firing Poulin and Loiselle and hiring Dubas, it has been pretty good. Hiring assistant coaches Peter Horachek and promoting Steve Spott from the AHL's Marlies, is another improvement. Horachek was a decent to solid coach in Florida on a bad team, and Spott will help promote some Toronto Marlies who deserve a shot at the NHL level (I.E. Peter Holland, Petter Granberg, Josh Leivo, Stuart Percy etc.) 

The Leafs have also kept Nazem Kadri and Jake Gardiner and that’s a major plus.

Shanahan has said changes would come, and they are now. Dubas is a terrific hockey mind and at only 28-years-old, he is regarded as being one of the top up and coming executives in hockey. If the Leafs didn’t hire him, someone would have eventually. However, we don’t think anyone expected it to come this soon.

Dubas was hired at the age of 25 (yeah, 25) to be the general manager of the Sault St. Marie Greyhounds of the OHL. He  took the Greyhounds, a hockey organization that finished out of the playoffs in his first season, to finishing first in the OHL’s West Division last season with a 44-17-2-5 record.

After he took over, they made the playoffs two out of the three years he was GM. He transformed the club to a winner.

Before that, he was a hockey operations assistant at the age of 14 with the Greyhounds, and then later worked as a scout for the club while enrolled at Brock University’s Sports Management Program. His grandfather, Walter, served as head coach of the Greyhounds from 1960-1967.

Dubas is regarded as being highly involved in the analytics of the game. He believes puck possession and a full four lines of skilled hockey players is how you win. Other and current Maple Leafs faculty didn’t seem to grasp this. All the good hockey teams have a full four lines who can contribute. No Colton Orr’s, Frazer McLaren’s and if teams have guys who can drop the gloves, they must be able to at least contribute positively to the team’s success or puck possesion stat. 

The hiring of Dubas is a major step in an organazational shift for a team that has had a black cloud hinder their success for years. Finally, it seems as if the blue and white are running with the big dogs. Mindsets that is.