The boy wonders: Does Kyle Dubas know what he’s getting into with the Penguins?

The soap opera is over. Time to move on.

Whether Kyle Dubas was completely full of crap or not, it no longer matters, at least not to the Maple Leafs. That the city seems massively more preoccupied with the departure of a hockey general manager with one trip past the first round in his NHL career than the relocation of a basketball coach with championship pedigree to Philadelphia, well, that’s a Toronto thing and we’ll just leave it at that.

We know what new Leafs GM Brad Treliving has on his plate. We’ll see if, like Ron Francis, he is able to productively use the lessons of his first NHL general manager job in his second.

But what about Dubas? What has Toronto’s former boy wonder signed up for with the Penguins?

Well, a much different job than he had in Toronto. While we wait for Dubas to decide what powers he’ll hold as Pittsburgh president of hockey ops, and what he’ll give to the team’s new GM when that person is hired, it’s worth comparing the task he was dealing with in Toronto compared to that which he has taken on in Pennsylvania.

The Leafs, as we know, are the league’s most important franchise in its biggest market. The Penguins have been one of the league’s marquee franchises since winning the lottery and the rights to draft Sidney Crosby in 2005. Need a team for an outdoor game? Call Pittsburgh. Need a team to boost mid-season ratings on whatever U.S. broadcast outlet has NHL rights? Call Pittsburgh. With Crosby, Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang, the Penguins have been on centre stage for a long time.

Now, however, they are an old, tired group. Malkin is 36. Crosby is 35. Letang is 36, with some really scary health problems in his recent past.

This, needless to say, is very different than what Dubas inherited in Toronto. By the time he took over as GM, Lou Lamoriello had done all the heavy lifting to clear out the riff raff and the bad contracts. The Leafs had drafted Morgan Rielly, William Nylander, Mitch Marner and Auston Matthews, the makings of a terrific young core.

In Pittsburgh, the team essentially has no top young prospects. The Penguins haven’t had a top-20 pick in a decade. When they had the No. 8 and No. 22 picks in 2013, the Penguins screwed up both, taking Derrick Pouliot and Olli Maatta, passing on the likes of Jacob Trouba, Filip Forsberg, Tom Wilson and Andrei Vasilevskiy.

Pittsburgh’s cupboard is bare. The Penguins have the No. 14 pick next month in the draft, and no second-rounder. That pick was dealt to Nashville for veteran Mikael Granlund, one of the last of the pointless moves made by the Brian Burke/Ron Hextall regime.

The good news is that Crosby, Malkin and Letang are all still very good players, if no longer what they once were. Crosby was 16th in league scoring this season, while Malkin was 26th. Jake Guentzel, meanwhile, had 36 goals, Rickard Rakell had 27 and Jason Zucker scored 26. Still, the team missed the Stanley Cup playoffs in the final week because it couldn’t beat awful Chicago or horrible Columbus.

As Burke and Hextall could tell Dubas, the new owners of the Penguins aren’t interested in a teardown or a rebuild. They want whoever is running the team to take another run at a Cup, as unrealistic as that might be to everyone outside of Pittsburgh. That probably means more moves like the Granlund deal, and no possibility of moving one of the stars for some badly needed futures.

Dubas has no experience with this type of situation. With the Leafs, he had to take a young group, augment it with other players, and try to get the team to a level of success it hadn’t experienced in 20 years. Outside of the regular season, he failed.

Obviously the Penguins saw in that failure glimpses of brilliance that convinced them Dubas was the best choice to take over their hockey department. His age, expertise in analytics and preference for a puck-possession style of hockey may have been what made the Penguins believe he is their future.

He has already won over the local media, which went gaga over his hiring on Thursday, calling him “one of hockey’s most famous people” and a “genius.” Perhaps those qualities were obscured somewhat in Toronto while his teams were losing in the first round six years in a row.

It’s interesting that the common element between Toronto and Pittsburgh is that, in both places, Dubas didn’t get to pick his own coach but instead inherited an experienced head coach with a record of championships. In Toronto, that was Mike Babcock. In Pittsburgh, it’s Mike Sullivan.

We know Babcock and Dubas weren’t on the same page, and Dubas won that MLSE political battle. Sullivan, however, is a more formidable personality on the Pittsburgh scene, and he is extremely well-connected inside the organization and throughout the sport.

Maybe he and Dubas will see eye to eye, although this perception that they embrace exactly the same style of hockey may require further analysis. If the team stumbles next season, Sullivan shouldn’t count on more support than Babcock got. At least Sheldon Keefe isn’t waiting in the wings. Not yet, anyway.

Most people would agree Dubas did good work in Toronto. But the job ahead in Pittsburgh looks to be much more complex and difficult, even if the glare of the spotlight is less. As well, Dubas no longer has a buffer between himself and ownership like he did in Toronto with Brendan Shanahan.

Dubas must meet the expectations of immediate success set down by the Fenway Group and simultaneously start restocking the team’s depth chart with talented young players. Plus, he may have to find a goalie, never his strong suit in Toronto.

Maybe he is a genius. In Pittsburgh, he’s going to have to be.

Damien Cox is a former Star sports reporter who is a current freelance contributing columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @DamoSpin