The Hockey PDOcast - Summer Series Part 3 With Kyle Dubas

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Dimitri Filipovic is joined by Thomas Drance and Kyle Dubas to talk about how the combination of how increased financial flexibility for teams and a weaker UFA player class affected the trade market this summer, the unique challenges of retooling in the cap growth era, learning from past mistakes, getting the most out of the AHL as a developmental league when you have a heavy volume of young players coming in, and how the process of player evaluation has evolved over the years. If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

since 2015. It's the Hockey PEDEOCast with your host, Dmitri Filippovich. Welcome to the HockeyPedioCast. My name is Dmitra Filippovich and joining me here in studio, my good buddy Thomas Trans. Tom, what's going on? Thanks for the lead-in. I'm really excited. We've got another great episode and another, I mean, a high-end guest. We're having the time of our lives here. I feel like the rest of the hockey world has just gone off to their cottages and cabins and taking the summer off after all the first wave of news. Meanwhile, we're just doing like the best shows. I think we've really done. We've had a great list of guests. We're doing our people in the game week. We had Todd Diamond on to start the week. Uh, his candor was much appreciated.

Then we had Brennan Dillon in studio who's got to be one of the best guys in the league. He was phenomenal. We had to push him out of the studio at some point because he just wanted to hang out so long and just chop it up with us. So his perspective on how much retrievals have changed. Yeah. That was awesome. That was really cool. And we're going to keep the good times going. And so we got the player agent perspective. We got the player. perspective. Now we've got to get a GM in the mix. We're going to coach later this week as well, but we're bringing in the GM. And this is a long-time listener, first-time caller to the show. My good buddy, Kyle Duvus. Kyle, what's going on then?

All good, guys. How are you? We're good. We got a lot of fun stuff to talk about over the next 50 minutes. And Tom and I have spent a lot of time really since the off-season started discussing kind of the way the market has shifted a little bit this off-season in the NHL, right, with the cap going up to 95.5 million, the talent available in the free agency market, maybe not necessarily being where it's been in past years. And so now all of a sudden we got this interesting spot where teams around the league all of a sudden had more money to spend,

didn't necessarily have a ton of players to spend it on. And so we saw a pretty burgeoning, especially right off the bat, trade market. Now, unlike past seasons, we've kind of become accustomed to viewing some of these players with term and money attached to their deals as guys who, especially if a team needs to move out money because they're up against the cap and they want to improve their team elsewhere, wind up viewing them purely as cap dumps, where they're attaching picks or future capital to them to shift those contracts to other teams. Now all of a sudden we saw, you go on down the line. It started with Chris Kreider, but Evander Kane, Mason Marchman, Charlie Coil, and Miles Wood would go to Columbus. All of a sudden, these became commodities. And instead, the picks were going the other way. And so I'm really curious we are taking in conversations you were having with other GMs to start the offseason, kind of if you noticed that change, just the perception or the prism through which it was being viewed and kind of how that was taking shape

and taken hold amongst front offices as they tried to sort of adjust on the fly to this new situation where in NHL, much like us as analysts and the listeners at home as fans, are trying to kind of recalibrate on the fly here. Well, I think you have a good read on it. There certainly was not at the beginning of July, that robust type of marketplace, and we've done deals like this in each of the last two summers where with where we're at is we're trying to transition back into being a contending team. There just was not this year relative to 2024 right off the hop that market for you taking on a contract and getting prospects or draft. attached to it. And then that did change, you know, as the weeks went on, where teams, where teams that kind of used up their space a little bit on either trades or free agency, and then teams that were still kind of jammed a little bit, had to sort of get back into that

mode. And so it's, it hasn't been as robust, but it's certainly, I think the cap spiking. And then a lot of players that people, I think, thought were going to be available, resigning with their teams or signing in trades or what have you, it just left more space. and so that those options to accrue future assets to take on contracts, they were far fewer than they had been in previous years. Is it just a matter, Kyle, of where cap space in those flat cap seasons was sort of the scarcest resource that you had to manage, that now in some ways it's talent, again, like are we in a talent crunch

effectively for NHL teams? I think even going back, Tom, there's, there are, I think it depends on the type of deal that it is, what term is left, how much money's left on it, how badly you need to get out from it, you know, for any varying number of factors. If it's a plus 35 contract, if the player has severely underperformed, if the buyout isn't really doesn't make any sense because of the contract structure, I think there will always be, I sort of use the MBA as the barometer to an extent, it's not the exact same system, but there's always a, there's always a market for a team to take on a bad contract or a, a negative

contract in return for future assets. But I, I think that in our league, it has not been historically as big of a marketplace. And I, I don't think it will moving ahead as the cap goes to 104 and then 113 and then who knows where after that. So I think a lot of it will also have to do with the, you know, how are the budgets going to change as the cap. goes way up for varying different teams. I think some teams will be salary cap teams for sure. Other teams in different markets will perhaps not be, I think you'll see far more internal budget teams, I think.

But you never know, you never know because the game is growing at a great pace in terms of the revenue and viewership. And then you see the success of the four nations face off here, the Olympics coming up and how does that impact everything? I think it's so hard to tell in the short run. But I think we're going in a really strong. direction. So all of this is a it's it's another new landscape. There was the one when I first came into the league and then became a GM in Toronto and then there was the flat cap era, which was

a year and a half into my time there. Now this kind of another sort of boom cycle. And I think it will be different from the previous one, if you want to call that from 2012, 13 to 20. So it's having to be agile, I think will be the best, the best skill you can have. as a team. Yeah, I think that's totally fair because all those names I listed and thinking about it now and hearing you talk about it, we're all guys with essentially one year left in their deal and structured as such so that the actual salary being paid out is below the AAV. And so that becomes, you know, we used to view those as bad deals just because the cap was so tight and you're just shedding off that money to try to add elsewhere. But all of a sudden, with everyone having that as a resource, it's less of an issue. I'm curious for your take on this because, you know, we've been trying to wrap our head around the new CBA that's going to be kicking in next. September and some of the details in there and kind of how that's going to affect the marketplace and potential moves down the line. And one of them, we spoke a little bit about this with Todd Diamond. I wanted to blow it out even further here now that we have more time with Kyle. The idea that these sort of double retention deals, we've seen a lot over the past two,

three deadlines that have facilitated a lot of moves for some of these contenders right up against the cap where they can acquire a player at essentially 25 percent or their AV and compensate a third party team for playing the broker. that's going to become certainly more difficult now with this clause that there needs to be a 75-day window in the regular season between those retentions. I'm stealing Tom's idea here because he's the one that initially floated out to me. I'm going to pitch it as my own and act smart if you agree with it. But do you think that we're going to come to a point? Yeah, of course.

Do you think we're going to come to a point where two years from now or three years from now or whatever, let's say the trade deadline on that given years on a March 6th, for example, do you think we're going to see teams be kind of creative about using like that mid-December cut off as a potential second almost self-imposed deadline where you can not necessarily even for a guy who's a pure rental as an expiring but maybe as an extra year or two on his deal you acquire him you test run it for 75 days or so and then you retain the option to potentially ship them elsewhere and you're almost acting as a way station it's it's tricky because obviously these are all all the players are people and they have families and lives you got uprood and that's why we typically don't view it as like oh, all right, well, you're going to move to this new city for 75 days and then you're going to go elsewhere to reach your final destination.

But it would help theoretically accommodate that landscape we had previously and maybe make some of these deals more palatable for contenders to take big swings of the deadline. Yeah, I think in where your mind went is, I think where all of ours internally went when they, when that new provision was put in was, would there be a sort of an initial deadline ahead of that? 75 days. And then, you know, we kind of went back and said, okay, how many double retention deals were done outside of 75 days ever? There aren't, it's hard to find any. But, you know, so it shows the teams tend to do those closer to the actual deadline or within a month or so.

We did, especially in the last two years, I think in 22 and 23, we did those in Toronto a number of times right near the dead. deadline with Ryan O'Reilly. Nick Folino was a double retention as well in 2021. But it'll be interesting to see whether that comes into place, whether that, you know, 80 to 75 to 80 days before the actual deadline. I struggle to see it because the players traded that require that sort of salary retention tend to also have some of their own trade protection as well, which may limit the ability

to do these types of things. but you never know. It's a, it is an interesting provision that's in there. And as we've seen there, I think there'll be lots of teams in the league that will attempt to get creative, but I have no idea how it will truly play out. And we, we won't know for another, for another few years. You mentioned flexibility a couple answers ago and sort of broke down some of the history since you sort of landed in Toronto first assistant general manager and then

obviously as the general manager of the Maple Leafs. And I even think about that season where the cap surprisingly didn't grow. I think that was the season, you were still an AGM in Toronto, the season after Babcock, Babcock's first season in Toronto. And the Canadian dollar had plummeted and all of a sudden you had a surprise lack of cap growth. And as I recall, the Maple Leaf signed like PA Parento and Michael Grabner or maybe it wasn't Gromner, but there was a wash of guys. Was that a Brad Boise year?

Was that maybe Sean Mattis? Like, just like a class of Mark Archibello? I feel like that was all the analytics favorites. The class of idyll sick wingers, basically, who in other years might have had a greater market, but all of a sudden the cap was flat, um, shockingly, right? And then we had sort of these, this multi-year cash crunch in the first sort of wave of the pandemic, then the cap crunch of the, of the flat cap. Now we're in, in this era of.

growth, looking at the history of the league since the hard cap was imposed and how frequently expectations of cap growth have gone unmet. How useful is it to have this three-year fixed agreement from a planning perspective? And how does, how do you sort of plan for cap growth while retaining a healthy skepticism based in the long history of the business of the NHL? well um i think that it goes back to that previous answer we you know when when the years that you're referencing there and those players signed were all in the first um they would have all been inside the first year or two or three in in Toronto um certainly 14 15 that was uh art Cabello and 1516 was the Parento, the Grabner trade at the beginning of the season that

was between like Lou and Garstnow or the GMs that that did that one where the Islanders need to get off of Grabner his money for the year and we had we had a 50 contract limit issue so it was a five for one deal. but but now Kyle was was Carter for Hagee part of that deal? He was part of that right yeah he was yeah he was just he had just finished he just finished his he just finished in in Niagara and had just come was coming into his first camp getting ready for his first pro season and and then he was off to the islanders and we bounced around the ECHL you know with them I think the I don't even know the teams he can't recall the teams he played for and then was traded

from the islanders to Tampa for the goaltender, because good Levskis. And yeah, yeah. And then, so he was in Syracuse. So we played him quite a bit with the Marleys. And he's a great person. So it's great to see him. He's really popped, obviously, as everybody knows.

So I think in looking back at those years, they can be instructive. I think different types of players get crunched when the dollars get tighter. it's a massive benefit for us in planning to know that we've got where it's going to likely be for three years. And there's also a push to kind of give more clarity to teams as it goes along as well. And I think that will be hugely valuable, especially for us as we begin to plan ahead, you already. And we dealt with this in Toronto, when you start to draft higher and your goals to gain high-end talent, that way, you have to immediately start planning for how they're, you know, those contract extensions.

all goes well how those contract extensions are going to fit into your mix, you know, four or five years down the road. So the league and PA have both pushed for clarity and that's been a great, great help for us in terms of being able to really plan deep into the future. As you referenced previously, you would do your best to plan as deep into the future, but then you'd get the cap number sometime.

The league would do a good job of giving you a bit of a heads up, but then when it would come out in late June, you would really, at some points, be pressed. And obviously we dealt with that in Toronto. the list of teams the bridgeport sound tigers the syracuse crunches you mentioned and don't forget the missouri mavericks for carter bro missouri mavericks i was gonna yeah um i'm curious kyle do you share the sentiment because i've spoken about this on the podcast i'm i'm sure you have maybe are reviewing it through a different lens but this idea that where you and the penguins are at right now is a slightly unique spot relative to the rest of the league

in terms of how we've seen a lot of these teams act, right? Action speak louder the words. Everyone's going to have a sort of brave face about, yeah, it's a new year. We're going to try to compete. It's going to be better than last year. But a lot of the teams near the bottom of the standings heading into this off season, we're relatively aggressive in terms of going out and either spending in free agency and adding guys or acquiring players via trade as we talked about to try and improve

their team and provide kind of an immediate stop gap. You guys certainly obviously brought in Anthony Mantha and just. in Bresso and made a couple trades, but it seems like a lot of it is focused around that lens of acquiring and accumulating as much future draft capital as you can. I think you guys are up to 17 picks in the first three rounds of the next three drafts, and a lot of that legwork has been done over the past calendar year. So you still obviously have a bunch of highly coveted, desirable veterans that are going to garner a bunch of attention in speculation and trade buzz. And so we'll see what happens with all of that down the line.

But with what you've done so far and the way you're viewing this sort of short term over the next year or two, do you feel like you guys are almost zinging a little bit while the rest of the league is zagging? Or do you think that's overblown and there's still kind of this traditional hierarchy of the top five to 10 teams and then that middle class and then the bottom 10 to 15? Yeah, the one thing that I do disagree with is just the notion that we're actively trying to get worse that doesn't really enter into our mindset at all that, you know, we're going to go out, we're going to purposely, you know, become worse. Our whole goal and everything that we are focused on is in trying to return the team back to being a contender and one that can sustain itself once it's there. And what we've elected to do last year and this year is rather

than go out and bring in players in their late 20s, really 30s and, you know, splashy, free agent deals and players that are going to begin to decline as the group of young players that you're referencing that we're going to pick with this draft capital or younger players that we acquire with that draft capital once they start to make their way. We just don't want to have, we didn't want to have those types of guys be going into decline and hindering what we could do once those young players begin to hit. So the strategy that we've elected to use, and time will tell how it all fares out, but we've had a very precise plan and we've just tried to execute it has been to identify

players that we think haven't received a great opportunity yet, try to give them that opportunity, and then they've all been mostly young enough where if they show that they can, if they show that their potential is only going to improve, and they're going to reach it with us, they have the chance to be a part of it as they move ahead. So if you look at this summer, whether you referenced Anthony Mantha, Justin Brezzo,

I think Mant is a bit of a different case because of the injury sustained in Calgary last year, but has always been a player that, I think, you know, great from the draft all the way through the people of view is having tremendous potential. It's, you know, can he come in here,

coming off the injury with an incentive-laden deal and prove it and given his age, be a part of helping the team move ahead and get back to where we want to go. And then, you know, there are others like Brazzo, who know from my time with Toronto when we had signed him there, but also on defense, you guys like Parker Weatherspoon, Caleb Jones, who maybe haven't gotten a massive opportunity yet, but have shown well when they have at very different parts. And, you know, we're going to have young guys coming along.

We've obviously got the group of veterans that you mentioned. And can these players establish themselves as part of a core and help us move ahead? So that's the way that I look at these seasons and the coming seasons are trying to identify the players that are going to form that core group. And that's both at the NHL level and at the development level are players in Wilkesbury and Wheeling, but also that are outside the system, whether that's a Will Horkoff at University of Michigan or Bill Zonan, who will be in Blaineville or Ben Kindle and in Calgary and Harrison Brunick and Camloops on and on down the list. So that's how we view it. But every single thing that we do is about returning the team to contention.

That was the job that I knew that I was taking when coming to Pittsburgh was that, you know, I think because of how great the core group had been and the legacy of that core group, there's the notion that everyone would, of course, everyone would love to see them contend and continue to win because they're revered. And in Sid's case, obviously, he's beloved throughout hockey. It's very difficult to find anybody to say anything even remotely negative about Sid. Everyone wants to see him in the playoffs. Everybody wants to see him have success.

And our push and our goal and everything that we do is about trying to build a team around that can be a contender before those players go off into the sunset. It's a difficult thing to do. But that's when we talk about urgency, that's what we're talking about. So we don't want to put a huge timeline on it that it's going to take. five or 10 years. We're trying to make it happen so that these guys can, you know, pass the torch to this, to this next group that will be a sustainable contender long after.

Kyle, I'm curious to take some of the specifics you just discussed and sort of pull it out back to the general and the theoretical. But in so doing, I also don't want to get bogged down in like rebuilding labels or what have you. Just general theory of sort of, roster construction and how the game's moving here. In a world where the cap rises and teams like say the Florida Panthers are better able to

retain their winning groups, right, where contending teams have more ability, more levers to pull in in keeping their group together, what sort of challenges does that pose for a team trying to effectively like rocket ship their way back up the the the NHL pecking order well i think i think that's why as we've gone through you know things changed so much we've talked about already a few times in hockey so you know uh in the middle of the year at the end of the year um you know we talked here internally and then and then season ending medians in such about now start to execute on all the assets that we have. But then as you see the landscape start to shift,

and you see teams able to do that, maintain their core longer than they have been in previous years, the way that we've come to view is we need to continue to stockpile our assets to be able to help us either draft and develop our own players at an expeditious rate. And having a lot of picks can be the major, way to help that or to put ourselves into conversations to acquire players that become available,

you know, for whatever reason that doesn't work with their team. The team just doesn't want to sign them as an RFA. They don't want to be in a, they don't want to be in a place because they don't like the place or they don't like the organization or they don't like, they feel they're blocked out by opportunity. The reasons you've seen forever players get traded at at those stages. So for us, I think the way that we view it in terms of as things have changed here with the salary cap having certainty and continuing to climb,

you know, certain contenders doing everything they can to maintain their spot at that position. And I think the early 2010 era where there was, you know, there was a select group of teams that I think contended year in year out. Vancouver was one of those teams. Obviously Boston and then, of course, Chicago, L.A., and then Tampa comes into the fray as well.

Detroit was right at the end of the air group. and of course Pittsburgh was always there throughout the whole time. It just shows you that as the cap went up in those times, free agents always wanted to go to those teams, they had a chance to contend. And you had to find a way to thrust yourself into that landscape. And at that time, it was mostly by having high-end talent that you had drafted or acquired at a young age and having that become your core and then continuing to draft around

it or continuing to add around it with the assets that you had, whether your prospects or draft picks. in this later stage, you know, I think Vegas and Florida are very instructive in that they've been able to make an unbelievable like stack rate trade and transaction on top of one another and do things a little bit of a different way. And whether that can, you know, so I think that gives you a different path as well. And but for us here, it's going to, we want to put ourselves in the spot to be able to do potentially both, which is have the assets to, make those types of deals that come available, like, you know, and looking back at the types of trades that number of teams have made to thrust themselves into contention, you know, mostly in collection with one another.

It's not just one trade at times. If you look at both those teams that I've referenced, but, and then also to continue to have a player personnel department and a development department and an R&D department that can all work together to make sure that we're making the best possible decisions on those fronts as well and learn from mistakes in the past that we've made or I've made in Toronto and here and continue to try to improve. So I think it is a very different way, but I think the way that you thrust yourself into contention will probably revert back to the way it was at the beginning of the salary cap going in. That's what I think, and I think that's also a tried and tested way.

It doesn't always work, and I think people can point to the rebuilds that don't work or they do or so on and so forth. but for us, that's, that's, you know, we're going to try to put ourselves in a position to do both. All right, Kyle, let's take our break here. And then when we come back, we'll join back in with it. I got a few more questions that I want to run by you. You're listening to the Hockey-Pedio cast streaming on Sports Night Radio Network. All right, we're back in the Hockeypedio cast, join by Thomas Drans, as always, and our good bow.

Kyle Dubas joining us for our people in the game week. Kyle, before we went to break, we were talking. talking a little bit about draft picks and kind of going that route in terms of accumulating talent through that class. I have a question here for you that relates to this from our pal, Jack Fraser, who is our resident Penguins fan. And he wanted me to ask you about how you guys took Harrison Brunick 44th overall last year. But aside from him, if you go through the elite prospects draft guide, which I use for a lot

of this stuff because I'm not, you know, privy to watching every single one of these prospects on a day-to-day basis. I'm going to take their word for it. They have skating grades for the rest of sort of the top prospects you guys have assembled over the past year to either be a draft or be a trade with skating grades kind of between that four to five range out of a one to nine scale. And the reason why I'm framing it that way is because we had Brendan Dillon on yesterday. We had a really fun conversation with him about changes in the game and how certainly the skill level and pace in the NHL is higher than it's ever been before and it's going to keep going that way as all these young guys come in with all this skating development and trade skills coaches and stuff

that they're all kind of growing up with now. Yet I feel like there's a bit of a misnomer between playing fast and skating fast because it's obviously a great luxury if you have a McKinnon or a McDavid that can just gallop up and down the ice freely and embarrass defenders. But for the most part, playing fast is still the much more predominant thing, in my opinion, in terms of quick decision-making within the context of that pace and being able to get by that way. I'm curious if in your conversations with your scouting staff and all that personnel on that side of things,

whether this has kind of been coming up and whether you're viewing this now as an opportunity to get guys who might be undervalued in the draft because they're not sort of traditional blazers that are going to blow you away when you watch them, but they have all these other skills that fit within that context that I'm saying, and then you feel like once you bring them into the building and you're working with your development staff,

that's stuff that's going to be able to translate by the time they're ready to come to the NHL. Are you viewing it that way in terms of where the NHL is headed and kind of how we're sort of weighing all of these respective skill sets? Well, I think there's a number of different ways to answer the question. The first is, I think, developmentally, over time, the ability to affect change in skating through a combination of on-ice, high-level instruction, work ethic, but also off-ice components. And now that the skating stuff is essentially, especially at the NHL level, it's purely objective.

So you can measure precisely the work that you're doing for a player, in development sessions and in the gym and how that will impact or change their speed, outright speed, which tends to be the way that I would say most people would probably grade a player if they're purely grading them on skating, which I understand. So you're able to, unless the player has a severe physical limitation, which through the last whatever number of years it's been now, we've been able to also luckily and fortunately identify which physical limitations, are also pose a large barrier to skating development.

And so those are the two sort of developmental aspects of it. Then the other part is there's the, you know, if you can go really fast but you don't know where you're going or what you're going to do with the puck if you have it or how you're going to get it back. If you don't, you just go to a lot of bad places really quickly. And so more so than outright speed, I think what we've come to really,

the value most is the ability to change speeds and create space. Because if you can, because the fact that the game is so fast and so tightly checked, especially as the season goes on and the stakes get higher, the players that have the ability to change speeds and accelerate or, and combine all of that, their speed, their change of pace, their acceleration, their agility, change a direction, to be able to create space for themselves and then be able to create space for others. It's a combination of both their physical ability and their intelligence. It's really what begins to separate. So at the very high level, it's always, if you could be as fast as possible, that's great. But it's also being able to know how to use that and how to be

able to use it to create space or take away space from the opponent. on the theme of young players draft picks development and and the strategies they're in we've spent a lot of time on this program talking about the rising opportunity cost of bridge contracts in a cap growth environment but when we put that to todd diamond the other day he brought up a perspective that obviously a player representative would have that we wouldn't factor into our analysis which is more purely hypothetical talking about you know knowing your client and how they manage pressure and and what they'll respond to best, even beyond the idea of, you know, raw theories of income maximization from a player perspective, from a general manager's perspective and sort of waiting through those second contract issues in a new environment. How do you, what are some of the factors that you would consider that perhaps an analyst, someone just sort of reading the tea leaves and coming up with best practices rulebook on the back of a napkin as opposed to actually having to put them into practice that you'd sort of have top of mind in thinking through what that looks like

across the next five years. I think, yeah, it's probably, I would agree with Todd. And I think that a lot of the times the teams and the agents know some of the challenges good or bad that are going to come with either doing a bridge deal or a long-term deal with someone coming out of entry level or at varying different times. And from the outside perspective, I don't, I don't ever begrudge the view of an analyst, especially someone that does, you know, journalists or an analyst that does a deep work when they're trying to break down a contract and give it a grade or, you know, analyze whether it's a good deal or bad deal through whatever lens they choose older school just versus the marketplace or sort of

more progressive or newer school, look at what they project the value of the player to be using any number of inputs and then determine that versus what the contract ends up as. what the team or player had gained or lost. But the team and the agent who spend, and the team's from the team side of it, you spend every day with the player and you know a lot more about their personality, how they respond to different items.

I think the concerning part on a shorter term deal would be for a player that doesn't handle pressure or can get anxious with contract matters looming over them. You probably want to avoid the one to two, or three-year shorter-term deal where there's going to be more pressure on them to perform, especially if they've shown the ability to not get too complacent, continue to do their work, and you know that they're going to need to push to really improve over the course of a seven-or-eight-year deal. Conversely, on an eight-year deal, when you sign up to do a contract with a player for seven or eight years,

I think it sends the message to the organization that we're committing to this player long-term. We're paying him market value for those years, and the message that I think it sends, the rest of the room is this is what we want to be about. We're electing to reward this player with a longer-turned deal because we feel it represents what our team wants to be about. And so if that player at all shows the tendency to get complacent or, you know, to kind of have to get comfortable with the fact that they're financially set and not continue to work towards reaching their potential or pushing the team to help to win, I think that's

also an area where those deals can go off the rails. I just think there have been very few of those longer range deals for players coming out of entry level or even out of a two or three year bridge deal where you look back and say, geez, the team really got burned on those. There's far more that have worked out for both the player and the team than it's hard to name a lot of them that really haven't, you know, especially predating the flat cap COVID era and then now coming on the other side of it. It's just it's tough to look back on any of those deals and say that if you believe in the player enough and they showed enough in their entry level, that they totally provided poor value over the longer range. But maybe the team didn't reach the potential that everyone thought they should get to and people can cast that blame onto whomever the team, the player, what have you. But in terms of purely valuating the contract, they tend to work out very well for the team and the player, both. as you guys

have all these draft picks coming up and whatever trades you make bringing in young players I'm curious for your take on kind of utilizing both the ECHL but especially the AHL system as you know a developmental tool

because obviously during your time in Toronto you guys had a lot of success with the Marley's culminating in the 2018 Calder Cup championship and you look at the guys who were on that team and the careers they wound up going on to have in the NHL either in Toronto or elsewhere, even the 2016 team I was looking at in preparation for today's show,

you know, that had, you know, Kappanin and Connor Brown, but Willie Nealander, Hyman, even a Sam Carrick and kind of what they got out of that experience. I'm curious for your take on sort of either like stuff you took from that experience and can now apply in Wilkesbury and with the penguins and kind of how all of that works and just your general view of the NHL as a developmental tool because I know that teams around the league view it differently in terms of their utilization on it in terms of the balance of young players and veterans. Everyone there is obviously looking to put their best foot forward as well in terms of like the personal agenda certainly of you do well.

The team does well. You perform. It's going to lead to other opportunities. But just the holistic view, I guess, for the organization of with all these young guys coming in and trying to make the most of that experience and then use it as a stepping stone for hopefully playing for the penguin. one day in performing at the highest level, kind of how you weigh all of that stuff

and how you utilize that to its full potential. I think if, you know, and looking ahead a year from now as, you know, the prospective changes to the CBA, but also just the confluence of the types of players we're going to have coming in to our system in a year, whether that's, you know, Bill Zonan, who we drafted with our second first round pick this year,

but then Harrison Brunick, Melvin Fernstrom coming over from Sweden, if he's not ready for the NHL next year, you know, they will all have to start in the American League. So to me, we've talked about it here in terms of looking ahead, a season,

it begins to kind of have that feel of that 15, 16th in Marley's team, Dimitri, that you're referencing where you have like that first wave of really young players that comes in and, you know, there's, you know, that team had a, you know, fair, the star power with the young players, like they had William and Casperi Capon, and, but then it was, you know, the depth of the group that ended up, you know, that ended up really propelling it ahead. The way that we view the American

League is that it's a primarily a developmental league, but it's, it's also a spot where we want to win. We want the players to grow together as a group and learn how to win together. And I think the thing learned from those Marley's teams were that those playoff runs in 16, 17, losing to Syracuse in the second round in game seven and then ultimately winning in 18. If you look back on those teams, those playoff runs provided a great opportunity for younger players that may be a little bit more unheralded. And I'm thinking more of the 2018 team probably in this context with Mason Marchman, Trevor Moore, you know, Carl Grunstrom, guys that have gone on to have NHL careers and they were never rated in any top

100 prospect ranking or even 200 or 300. But they, you know, they were able to find their way of how to contribute to helping a team win and figure out what that route was going to be. You know, on that 18 team, Trevor Moore and Mason Marshman made up the fourth line of the team, every playoff game with Adam Brooks as the center. It was a very young line, but they ended up being a dominant line as the playoffs went on.

And without having those runs that go a month and a half or two months, that wouldn't get to come out. And so to us, that is very important. And Jason Speza and Amanda Kessel run the minor league operation for us here. And it's trying to follow that, you know, learn from what we could have done differently, but also make sure that we're putting the team in a position to can, to contend. I mean, I look at Abbotsford this year in Charlotte and different players on those teams that stepped up as it went through and we're watching those games and to see how young guys come through the playoffs, how different players that are maybe a little bit older respond to

it. And it just, there's so much of that opportunity that comes from that you never know if you don't get into that spot. So it's trying to combine a huge amount of developmental stuff, you know, in practice and in, you know, technical sessions that are explicitly for that, but then combine that with the tactics and, you know, the ability to teach the players what it's going to take to ultimately win. So it's a hugely important league, and it's especially hugely important for us now as we head into this era. We'd be remiss if we didn't take the sort of obvious pivot point there from American League playoff success. Just to ask you about the acquisition of the American League playoff MVP,

a trade you executed this summer. Does the experience you had as the Marley's GM and sort of watching how getting deep into the playoffs helped the growth of a more or a marchment type, both from a developmental perspective, but also maybe in terms of being a signal of ability that the industry was missing out on, right? The fact that they were able to be such big parts of that team. Does that in any way impact how you evaluate American League players or Arder Sheelovs in particular? I think the Shilab's trade was just more obviously, Vancouver, they've got two very good goaltenders at the NHL level that are signed in the long range. So, you know, at Shilab's age, it just sort of puts it up against the waiver clock and everything of that nature. And, you know, in his case in particular, I think our goaltending department had had him circled for a long time.

And we actually thought the playoff, you know, and the playoff run was just another in a, If you go back to last year with the Canucks when he had to come up, but then also with Latvia and the 2020-3 World Championship, he just shows the ability to sort of arise in those moments. And we have to, you know, now for us is to be able to come in here and see if we can iron out some of the issues that I think the Canucks done a great job with. And obviously it paid off in the playoffs, but just becoming more consistent during the season

and reliable night in and night out. I think we're going to have, because of where we're at versus where the Canucks are at, we're going to have more of an opportunity and a runway for him to, for him to, you know, to kind of live through the ups and the downs a little bit. And for us knowing that he's been able to step up

and pull through in difficult moments in the playoffs and world championships in his career, you know, it's hard to find goals that have that same thing. So it's, for us, it was, The Canucks were in a spot where we could pay to, you know, pay some draft capital to get archers here. And then, you know, they're fortunate to have the tandem that they do at the NHL level. So I think for, it's not just the way that he played this year, but it's the history of being

able to do it at those times. And then the, you know, the analysis of the gold tending department. Unbelievable on brand for Tom to start talking Abbots for Canucks and Arcto she loves and trying to get an article at the athletic out of this. Kyle, as an analyst myself, I think the idea of kind of reflecting on process every year and continuing to adapt and evolve as the product itself does and the business behind the scenes does

is an integral part of not getting stagnant, but also just getting better at the job. And I hope that that's something that I've done during my time doing this. I think back to like when you first joined the Leafs in 2014, that was kind of like the peak heyday of, you know, the start of analytics on hockey Twitter. And I think to the tools that were available and the stuff that I was using in my own work and kind of how far we've come since that point where there was such an emphasis placed on stuff like zone starts and quality of competition and just raw shot metrics. And then thinking back to those days compared to what I'm trying to integrate into my work now and kind of how we've come along the way there.

It's obviously been a decade. So it's a good thing that that's happened. But I'm curious for your take as an executive, kind of how you feel about that process as an evaluator in terms of how that's changed over the years, maybe stuff you're kind of trying to incorporate as new components into that player evaluation process and kind of how that all works together

and sort of the journey you've been through over these past 10, 11 years now. Yeah, it's interesting because I started out in hockey purely and scouting and then player development in my time ensue. And then, you know, we began to integrate a very basic level, you know, data and analytics are modeling for the draft and then to evaluate our own team over time and found that to be very helpful for us. And I think as the years have gone on, you know, as more quality data and information

has come to light and it's been made readily available. It's the ability to take all that. And then really now what I've seen is it's, you know, at the beginning it was sort of player personnel in scouting view versus the data view and the old school versus the new. And what I see now, not just with our team, but in talking to other teams, it's trying to combine, you know, everything in the best way to make the best decisions. And when I think back of, you know, my time. A lot of it, you know, when you get out from trying to pick one way or the other and you learn,

you make sometimes, you know, massive mistakes to kind of sit with you and you think about them, you know, forever, every day, you know, you're really rather than trying to just appease one avenue of thought, whether that's data or scouting or development or what have you, it's, you're trying to really just combine it all together as best you can and take your experiences, is take all the different information as it's improved, hire excellent people that can bring it all together and build a collaborative approach to it. And I think going back early,

it was more of an argument and then appeasement, right? You know, you're listening to the argument trying to pick who wins between the two sides or trying to appease each side back and forth on different decisions. And I think that's, you know, looking back on my time, what's led to some of the bigger mistakes. And then really, you know,

from the 21 draft on, you know, through the trade deadline that year, that next offseason and forward, it's been trying to focus on building a collaboration and then take all the information and then just execute the best decision rather than appease anybody. And that to me is I think is what I've seen. There's really not a meeting that we go into where, you know, where there's, you know, where there's, you know, the purely scouting side and then the analytic. view, it's everyone working together and it would be strange now to have a meeting without everybody in it, whether it's draft or scouting meetings or free agency or trade deadline.

I think everyone wants to work together. They want to test their views off of everybody to be able to continue to improve and adapt. And that to me is the biggest change I've seen since coming into the league, I guess now, 11, 12 seasons ago. How, like Dimitri and I, I know you're a big sports fan, not just a huge hockey watcher, a voracious hockey watcher, but also a big baseball fan and pay attention to soccer and basketball and football. And a couple bits that we've had across, you know, our shows on this program are the idea of the NBA moving closer to hockey as a result of a higher volume of three point shots, making outcomes or scoring events a little bit more variable in combination with

that second apron rule, effectively imposing a hard cap. on NBA teams or at least limiting their flexibility if they go too far into luxury tax. We've seen with the NFL repeated cap growth that sort of more closely mirrors where we're at. Are there any concepts or practices or managerial approaches that you're tracking in other sports that maybe pertain in some way to where we're going in the NHL versus sort of where we've been? Well, I think the hard-cap leagues in terms of strategy and execution and different ideas are certainly the best for us to follow purely on the roster construction or strategic side of it. And sort of we try to study that as deeply as possible and use our relationships and the relationships that have been built over a long time with people in those sports

to continue to share information, share ideas, and, and try to study what is really worked and what hasn't worked. I think it's the teams that work, like, you know, you can, the teams that work get a lot of, get a lot of coverage, but the teams that don't, that I think it's equally important for us to study with the way that they tried to do it in leagues that are similar to ours and then try to learn from those. The major difference is, just the impact in in the NFL and the NBA of one player in the NFL's case, a quarterback is just so massive. And, you know, in hockey, yes, if you had the best player every time,

it's what you would want to have. There's no doubt. But it's a very different sport in that, you know, the quarterback's on for every offensive play. They're going to touch the ball every offensive play. In hockey, you know, you've got four lines. So your very best players playing. 25 minutes at the, you know, sometimes I know it creeps a little higher or lower,

but there's the other half of the game that's still there, right? And so we're always trying to, I think, more just more study the strategic side of it and ways to expedite going through these sort of transitions that like we're in right now with the penguins and what can we learn from teams that have gone through them successfully and quickly. And then what can we learn from teams that have been kind of stuck in that mode for a long time in our sport and others? and try to avoid that.

So I think there's something, and it's so much we can learn just but our thinking from our own, our previous mistakes or things that we did well in other places. And we've got people now from, you know, in our organization, from different sports, we have a lot of people from baseball.

We have a lot of people that have been with different teams in the NHL or at different experiences. And so it's great to sit and collaborate and talk through all the different ways that we've all got here and what we learned along our journey and use that to be in. instructive test as we move ahead here with Pittsburgh. Well, this is awesome, Kyle. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy summer schedule.

You got anything that I always ask the listener or the, our guest, if they got anything to plug. I don't know if you got, you got, you got to plug the Penguins schedule release or do you want to plug so whatever's going on with the Mariners right? The Mariners, we get a big series this weekend against Houston. That's, that's the next step for the Mariners. But no, we got the next is we've got October 7. Madison Square Garden against the Rangers.

So we're excited about that. And, you know, I just think we're, it's an exciting year to go into. It's all, you know, a whole new coaching staff. We went through a long process to hire Dan Hughes as the head coach. And obviously, Mike Sullivan is a legendary figure here and one of the best coaches in the league. But, and very happy that he'll have the chance to go to the Rangers and continue to do his thing there. but for us it's exciting to to inject a kind of new coaching staff here with our team

and help us move ahead. So I'm just excited. It's been a lot of fun going through development camp and now we're just sorting through staffing stuff, but we'll look forward to recharging here a little bit as the summer goes on and watching lots of baseball and then being ready to go for early September and through the year. Awesome, man.

I'm glad we've finally got to do this and hopefully we'll get to do it again in the future. Speaking of coaches, We've got one more people in the game show coming up here to close out the week, and it will be a coach, although maybe we'll keep it a bit of a surprise and unveil it tomorrow. But thank you to Kyle. We'll write it down in Penn, not pay, not. Yeah, yeah, we'll see. Join us in the Pediocast Discord.

Give us a five-star review. If you're joined today's show and you're enjoying this series, it's greatly appreciated from us. And we'll be back tomorrow with that show. So thank you for listening to the Hockey, Piedocast streaming on the Sportsnet Radio Network.