Maple Leafs have to hope there’s a first prize for second choices in the GM sweepstakes

Brad Treliving had already spoken when Kyle Dubas was introduced in Pittsburgh on Thursday, where Dubas is now in control of the dying days of a hockey dynasty. The Penguins won three Stanley Cups with the Sidney Crosby-Evgeni Malkin-Kris Letang core in their 17 years together, but now Dubas is charged with a graceful end to the era, while building a bridge to something new. It will be a hard job. It wasn’t his first choice.

And in Toronto, Treliving is now running what Dubas left behind: a state-of-the-art organization that did everything but win when it mattered, and when the Leafs finally did it took a week before it felt like an utter failure again.

Still, team president Brendan Shanahan wanted Dubas back as his GM. He believed nobody was better for the job, and decided that both during the season and at season’s end, three weeks after Treliving had decided Calgary wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

So everyone is left with second choices, and that’s the story of the Leafs now. Dubas wanted to return as GM, albeit at a higher salary than Shanahan had offered, and it is strongly believed that he did so partly because he felt so responsible for what he had built, and the people in the organization. Now he starts over in Pittsburgh, and it’s a mess. It was the Penguins who lost a game they needed to win at home to a bare-bones Chicago team that was trying to lose, which allowed Florida into the playoffs to knock out the Leafs. Funny old league.

And the task of hockey in Toronto — of this franchise that could make you believe in curses, even if it’s just the accumulated failures piling upon one another, like layers of sediment that weigh heavier every year — smashed up Dubas and Shanahan. It was ostensibly over money or control or process, or a combination of them, sure. But if they had won more, if they had lost to Florida in seven games, if they had reached the conference final or more, Dubas probably doesn’t talk about walking away in his season-ending presser — “I mean, maybe I was a little too honest with how I was feeling in that exact moment,” Dubas said in Pittsburgh Thursday — and they probably could have worked it out.

Instead, Dubas got a team with a staggering eight no-trade or no-move clauses, star players in their mid-30s, and a wife and kids he has to relocate to Pennsylvania, further from their extended family. Aside from getting a president’s title and the security that implies, that can’t be what Dubas most wanted.

And because the Leafs organization banked so hard on things finally working out, the conundrum Dubas left behind is messy, too, with no obvious solution. Treliving came in like a humidifier in a dry room: he was just trying to make everyone feel comfortable. So you got the dad jokes, the defence of the core four — you can’t exactly run down your best assets but there is a sense the core remains highly valued in the organization — the openness to the same coach, and to a similar style.

As Treliving spoke about protecting his players and not wanting to throw a body on the tarmac, not wanting to make a move for the sake of making a move, it mostly sounded like Shanahan, over the years. Always remember this about Shanahan: He’s an emotional guy who tries not to make emotional decisions.

But this wasn’t what Shanahan wanted, either. Treliving has so much to do even before he can’t work the draft: 10 free agents in a terrible free agent year, the coach and his staff, all while learning how the vast and disparate parts of the organization work. And of course there are the decisions regarding the stars, whether you keep them or not. There is no human way to get appropriately up to speed in order to make the giant decisions in the very near term with adequate information. That’s not optimal, no matter how you look at it.

So even if this organization is talking itself into relative stasis — saying it’s hard to get great players, saying they just need a little more jam in front of the net — that is a difficult road. Dubas had relationships with his players, built up over years.

And now, if they stay, Treliving has to go to the core four — the core three, really, in this case, since John Tavares sure as hell isn’t going anywhere — and tell them that if they want to play in Toronto and they want to win, Auston Matthews can’t make $15-million in a year, and William Nylander can’t make $11-million in a year, and Mitch Marner will get the same speech in a year. All four star forwards talked a good game about how much they love it here at season’s end, in between not taking any responsibility for the Florida series. Maybe Treliving can be the guy to make them live up to it at the bargaining table.

But if you wanted to discern the fatal flaw in the Dubas tenure, it wasn’t necessarily how he constructed the team along the margins, where Dubas consistently found high-value fringe players; it wasn’t necessarily the style the team played, which was predicated on trying to get to the front of the opponent’s net, and to protect their own. Treliving, and about every hockey mind, agrees with that.

No, in the biggest games, the fatal flaw for the Leafs has often been that core. They rose against Tampa Bay and flopped against Florida, and when even Dubas said it was time to consider every option, that’s when you knew it just might be time. Now Dubas is cleaning up after a dynastic core that actually won, and Shanahan has a new GM who is charged with a core that hasn’t, and needs exceptional work to make it happen. Nobody got their first choice, here. The Leafs are picking up the pieces, and we’ll see if anybody really gets what they want.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur