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Brendan Shanahan joined TSN Overdrive on Tuesday to discuss the decision to move ahead with Kyle Dubas as General Manager and losing Lou Lamoriello and Mark Hunter in the process.


First of all, did Lou want to continue to be the GM? Did he make that clear to you?

Shanahan: We really didn’t get that far into the discussion. Basically, we were all aware of his contract situation. I think that you make plans, but then as you are getting there over the course of three years, you are constantly evaluating and assessing what you have in the organization, the direction you’re going. As Lou says, “You have a five-year plan and you change it every day and every week.” But as we got a little bit closer, I just sort of looked at what we had in the organization and had decided that the three-year time period was the right one.

I thought that we had some good candidates from within the organization and just sort of felt that I wanted to be proactive on this and not necessarily wait until everyone’s contract is up and sort of skate everyone to free agency and not have anyone available to me as well. I just thought that the timing is right.

When you make decisions for organizations trying to build – at least this is just my opinion – I think that there are different people for different times with an organization’s development. Lou was certainly someone that we really needed at the time. Part of him coming in, as much as he took on a leadership role, was also that he was very giving in his mentorship to a lot of other people here, including myself. I think he knew, always from the beginning, that was part of what he was trying to provide for me: Experience for our office staff, our coaching staff, our scouting staff, our management staff. He did a great job for us.

After that decision, you go into a possession where you know Dubas and Hunter both want the job. Were you at all curious to find out what was outside of the organization at any point?

Shanahan: I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t evaluate what else was out there. I think some people have ideas about how they would do it, or decisions they would make or how they would unfold, but unless you’re doing it in a daily, practical way, it doesn’t necessarily make sense. The suggestion that I would tell Lou he wasn’t coming back and then announce his successor the same day would almost imply that, while we were in a playoff run, I would have to go behind his back and negotiation with people he was working with every day. That’s just not something I would ever do to him and not something anyone would do in the National Hockey League.

I felt that I knew we had good candidates. I know there were some people outside of the game as well that were available. As I narrowed it down, I just felt that our candidates inside – specifically Mark Hunter and Kyle Dubas – were the two best ones.

Mark Hunter’s biggest thing he brings to the table is finding players and bringing talent to the organization. How difficult or complicated or awkward is it going into the draft with him saying that he’s not going to be a part of the organization anymore?

Shanahan: I want to make it clear that Mark did offer…. He and I, and he and Kyle, had some conversations, and he felt he wanted to move on at the end of this year. But he made it clear to me that, if we wanted him to remain to do this draft, he would do that. Upon a little bit of reflection and in talking with Kyle Dubas, I went back to Mark and said that we think it would be better off for everyone, including our scouting staff and all of the constituents that are supporting the Toronto Maple Leafs, that we just make the cut now and make it clean – not try to perform any sort of dishonesty.

People talk. People understand. People knew what was going on. I think it would be uncomfortable for Mark and uncomfortable for Kyle. It’s just not something we wanted to do. When I spoke to Mark, in spite of his offer to do that, he agreed that it was probably the best thing to go our separate ways.

You know the way the rumour mill works. You guys have done a remarkable job of keeping everything in house. But with all of this movement and everything that has happened, people talk and people start buzzing. Are you at all concerned that your scouting staff will be leaving with Hunter, or are they fully committed to working with the Maple Leafs?

Shanahan: I think, more importantly, you look at Kyle Dubas and he’s the General Manager. He’ll be making those decisions. I’m sure there are tweaks and changes he will want to make in how we evaluate, how we present our meetings – just little nuances, not big, sweeping changes. But the staff remains. The staff is under contract. I don’t imagine a mass exodus. In fact, Kyle is in Regina right now with many of our scouts watching a couple of games until he rejoins the Marlies tomorrow. We had some people in the office today.

We are all going to miss Mark. We all liked Mark very much. But it’s not a case now of people running out the door.

You’ve got four really smart hockey people – Mark Hunter, Kyle Dubas, Lou Lamoriello, Jacques Lemaire – and now you’re down to two. Is it a situation where you talk with Kyle and you’re looking to add to the staff heading into next season to kind of shape up some numbers again? Brandon Pridham, as well, is a bright hockey mind.

Shanahan: Yeah. I’ll say this: We’re aware of optics. We think optics are important to the extent that you care about the people who invest in your team and their emotions. You care how they feel and you care that, for a while there, it was about hope, and then it was about trust, and then it was about optimism. But you don’t let optics make your decisions for you. On a day like today, we are always going to feel it’s a day where we’re talking about people departing. You’re definitely going to feel like you lost some really good voices in the room. But we weren’t caught off guard by this. We weren’t caught by surprise. These were decisions that I made knowing what the likely ramifications were.

Over the next period of time, it will be about replacing some of those voices. On a day like today, you definitely appear weaker and it’s our job to just sort of pick up from here and seek out some of those strengths that we had that are maybe missing this morning and replace some of those voices.

There has been some ageism directed towards Kyle Dubas. He’s a young guy and he’s never been a GM in the league. There is this idea that he is a new-school, numbers guy, which is maybe unfair a little as well. The same goes on the opposite side for Hunter – this idea that he’s this grit-grinding, rink-rat, old-school guy, which probably isn’t true either. But take us through your decision making when it came to Dubas. That is ultimately what we are dealing with in the future. You’ve handed the keys over to him. Why were you so comfortable with that?

Shanahan: First of all, let me just say – I’d never been a team President before. If the premise is you have to have the job experience to do a job or try to do it well, I wouldn’t have been hired, either. Somebody showed faith in me, and I want to reward those people with good, hard work.

For me, I was always about looking for the best person. If that person had experience, great. If they didn’t, I think sometimes people under-estimate the work that Kyle has done so far because of his age. This isn’t his first job. Four years resurrecting a junior A program in a very competitive league. Four years as a GM of the Toronto Marlies. He’s built our R&D department. He’s built our development program. He’s built our sports science department. Like I said, he is a guy you have to chase out of a hockey rink. I think he was a great candidate.

If you go back four years ago, when I was hiring people here, I was hiring people strictly based off of what I had heard about them and resumes where they had success in other organizations. I had heard about somebody who did something really well in New Jersey, somebody who had done something really well in Detroit. Sault Ste. Marie, London Knights. Brandon Pridham with the NHL. Over the last four years, I’ve had a behind-closed-doors view of all of these people and all of these decisions working together so that I was able to make a more informed decision on, frankly, some of the information that isn’t necessarily out for the public. I didn’t necessarily have to rely on someone’s success in another city.

Succession is important to me. I have to thank Lou again for so much of the work he did in helping our people grow. Without really sort of going through the minutiae and detail of all of the things I see in Kyle, I’ll just say that, knowing the implications of a day like today – where we were going to lose people – I think that whatever decision I was going to make this summer, I was likely going to lose the other two. Rather than focus on what we are going to lose, I really focused on what we were going to gain. I thought that the best person for the Maple Leafs going forward was going to be Kyle Dubas.

Does your role change at all now that Dubas is here and Lou is out?

Shanahan: I don’t think my role changes. I think that people, again, underestimate – maybe it’s ageism – Kyle’s competence. The same way that I gave Lou the freedom to make choices and be the GM, you have to do the same for Kyle. I’m there to support him in the same way I was there to support Lou. There are a lot of people that will imagine different dynamics – the coach, or different scouts. People respect the position.

Lou actually had a great respect for the pyramid of a hockey organization. There is even some stuff that I heard that ran concerned about Mike. Mike is a guy that is always going to give his opinion, but he’s never going to demand his opinions are met. The dynamic between Mike and Lou, and Mike and Kyle, I’ve had three years to observe it. If I didn’t think it was going to work, I wouldn’t have made this choice or this decision.

I’ve heard that Mike, in his contract reports to me, has got a contract like every other NHL coach. Maybe it’s got some bigger numbers than some of them, but he reports to the GM like every other coach in the NHL. Look, it’s Toronto. People care and they’re going to speculate. At the end of the day, I’ve seen those two work together. I’ve seen them get along. I’ve seen the respect between the two of them. These are not all new things that are going to sneak up on me.

Will we have challenges? Absolutely. Did we have them with Lou? We absolutely had them. That is part of working in hockey.

What do you think about Mike and Auston Matthews? The big talk about them flying to see each other – is that just a coach wanting to talk to his best player?

Shanahan: Yeah. I think the only thing strange about it was that it got reported. That’s Mike. Mike has met with several other players. He did it last year as well. I think that, again, sometimes things get made out to be a little bit of a bigger deal. Relationships with players and coaches evolve. Mike is tough on players because he expects a lot of them. So did the Jacques Lemaire’s of the world and so do the Joel Quenneville’s of the world, and the Scotty Bowman’s of the world. It is not always pleasant.

I used to say that, when I first got here, that Pittsburgh is not skipping around the streets, or Chicago, or LA with Darryl Sutter… it probably wasn’t nice every day with Darryl Sutter, either. It’s the relationship between the player and the coach and I commend Mike for, at the end of the year, getting out of the hockey arena environment and going down and sitting with several of our players; sitting with their mom and dad or their wife, or their kids, and getting to know them a little bit better.

You understand the importance of star players. You were one; you were a Hall of Fame player. A guy like Matthews reaches out to you… is there some trepidation to talking to him? Do you meet with him? Are you honest with him? How would you handle a relationship with Auston Matthews as the President of the team? If he wants to reach out and talk to you as Brendan Shanahan, the player, as opposed to the President, how do you handle a scenario like that?

Shanahan: First of all, I would communicate it with the rest of our staff so there is no sort of “behind closed doors” secrets or anything like that. I would meet with anybody on our team, from a star player to a young player in his first training camp. I saw Serge Savard get interviewed recently and he’s someone I really respected as an executive. One thing that he said was that you can never forget what it’s like to be a player. You always try to see things from their perspective and try to remember that, although it is a great career, it can sometimes be a difficult job. Not that anybody wants to give it away or stop doing it, but everyone can have difficult nights. To me, it doesn’t matter who the player was on our team. If someone wanted to meet, I would communicate with our GM and our coach and make sure everyone knew it was happening, and if I thought that was going to be helpful, I would do it.

With Lou leaving and Kyle taking over, obviously, he is going to develop his own managerial style. Will some of the things come from you as far as… Lou came in and it was almost like there was this cone of silence. We noticed it in the media, obviously, with rookies not available in certain situations, the facial hair – the things Lou came with from New Jersey. Is Kyle going to implement those things? Are there some things that Lou has put in place that you’re very comfortable with to continue on?

Shanahan: I think, when you hire a GM, you have to let him do his job. It’s funny. On the way in here, I heard Lou getting interviewed today and he was describing his new role with the New York Islanders, and he was essentially describing my job description. You oversee things, and you make sure to your best of your abilities that things are running smoothly. You put good people in place and you hope that they work well together.

I think Kyle probably saw some things from Lou that he really liked. I think there are probably other areas where he’s not going to imitate him. But certainly, even for myself, there are things that – working with Lou closely for three years – you’re going to learn. Shame on you if you worked for Lou Lamoriello for three years and didn’t learn something.

In terms of the promotion of players, Lou is always team-first. You play for the name on the front instead of the name on the back. That’s usually a cliché throughout the whole sports world. But you do have some young stars in a guy like Matthews, who is kind of hitting a level here that is almost unprecedented. Are you comfortable with that kind of celebrity? Do you try to clamp down on that level of celebrity? How do you handle that in a city like this where he is as big as he already is?

Shanahan: I think that everyone has to just keep things in perspective as far as what we are here to do first and foremost – and that is to play hockey. I think a lot of the rest of it is fun for players. Players enjoy social media. To take away some of the things that they have just grown with… we’re different. Players are different than other players from different eras. There is no going out to dinner on the road. Usually, they’re having room service and playing video games.

I remember, even toward the end of my career, seeing guys from my team playing poker together and they were all sitting in different seats around the plane. I thought, “What is the fun of playing poker if you can’t look a guy in the eye and slap the Queen down on him?” That’s not poker; that’s hearts. But I think you’ve got to allow them to be themselves. I also think that you just have to make sure that the focus is on what is most important, which is playing hockey and having success. I don’t think that changes here with the coaching staff that we have, with our management staff we have in place. I don’t think that changes in whatsoever anyway.

Three years ago, you were last place in the league. This season, you set a franchise record in terms of points and home wins. But it’s two years in a row where you were out in the first round. How close do you think you are to breaking through and getting over that hump?

Shanahan: We have some challenges in front of us and I think there are some important decisions coming up. But I like the direction we’re going. I read somewhere, and it’s true: Sometimes duration has to be a part of your plan. I think that is something that we really try to be mindful of – to continue to develop. Really, it’s all things all teams are trying to do. We’re trying to be better. Right now, there are only three teams left. We all want to get to where they are. We have an idea. We have a plan. Other teams have ideas and plans. Some are different. They might be right, we might be wrong. All I can say is: We’ve been lucky with some of the players we’ve acquired. We’ve been lucky with the staff we have in place. We feel we are pointed in the right direction, but we have to continue to get better.

The idea of standing still in the NHL doesn’t work. You get passed by very quickly. A lot of the things we’ve done this summer was a recognition of taking next steps and not just simply standing pat.