This low season, more than any I remember, there is anger at what the Toronto Maple Leafs and their “idiot” general manager Kyle Dubas have done to build the starting list for the 2022-23 regular season. Anger is palpable and elections are almost universally despised.
Related: Maple Leaf Comment: The honeymoon is over for Dubas and Shanahan
I admit I’m not always sure what the Maple Leafs management team thinks when they make the decisions they make. But I’ve come to see success in their work – the team set a franchise record of wins and points last season. And because I don’t have the ability to see the future, I have come to trust the past.
In this edition of the Maple Leafs News and Rumors, I will first report on the recent signing of Calle Jarnkrok. Then, I will use this signing as an example of what I think the team was thinking when they signed him. I think it’s an example of the process that I think the team goes through every low season to make list-making decisions.
Maple Leafs signs a 4-year contract with Jarnkrok Street
Calle Jarnkrok signed a four-year deal with the Maple Leafs yesterday. Jarnkrok’s four-year contract pays him $ 2.1 million per season.
In a recent interview, Maple Leafs general manager Dubas noted that his next move to free agency would likely be for the team to take a pamphlet about a player who saw an opportunity to look good with the team and seize this opportunity on a rebound. back treatment. He would have guessed a possibility among the top six for a short-term contract. Jarnkrok was not this signing.
Calle Jarnkrok has been a constant player where he has played. (Photo by Brett Holmes / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Some fans might think the signing is also interesting for its four-year term. However, I think the signing makes sense because it fills the team’s need to consolidate the third line as a closing unit.
With Jarnkrok, you get what you get. He makes a good defense and makes a consistently average but regular secondary offensive output (he has 15 goals and 30 points each season). Better yet, he rarely scores a penalty. In just one of his seasons in the NHL he has scored more than nine minor penalties. And it’s consistently a plus / minus positive (except last season with the Seattle Kraken).
What are the Maple Leafs thinking
In short, Jarnkrok is a versatile, mentally defensive third-line striker who can score goals and score penalties, but he himself makes very few penalties. He appears to be a less expensive replacement for Alex Kerfoot, who is now almost certain to be traded with the Maple Leafs now above the salary cap (which is allowed at this time of the season). The team has yet to sign third player Pierre Engvall and defender Rasmus Sandin.
Related: Maple Leafs dubas in the hot seat? Writers and fans weigh in
All in all, Jarnkrok is a third-line signing who to me seems like the Maple Leafs are trying to reduce errors at crucial moments in their game – think of game 6 of the postseason where they could have eliminated the Tampa Bay Lightning except for a couple of hard-hitting penalties that cost them the match in regulation. This signing makes sense to me, even though I didn’t see it coming.
Where does Jarnkrok fit into the Maple Leafs process?
As I admitted, I didn’t see the Jarnkrok signing coming. It only made sense to me when I thought about what the team was trying to do.
Some hockey fans and experts have already been critical of this signing. Why take it? What is the positive part? Why sign a four-year contract to a 30-year-old with a modified non-exchange clause?
I think sometimes fans can miss what’s going on with the team and the process that I think the management goes through every low season to try to make the team the Stanley Cup winner. That is the goal.
I think there is a formal process; and I, for one, trust him. [I’m coming to feel that I’m alone in that.]
So what is the Maple Leafs process?
When I say I trust the process, I don’t simply mean that I like their way of thinking (although I agree with that). By process, I mean the specific and formal way I think team management involves the work of each offseason. From my experience as an academic researcher and in the university leadership positions I have held, I think it is the right one.
Related: Where are they now? The Jonathan Cheechoo Edition
I trust the specific way the team works to make their decisions. It is not necessarily Moneyball, but it shares some of the same rigor and mathematical principles. Plus, it’s just good business management.
Good business practice (or good research practice, which was my area as an academic) is an iterative process. The team continues to return to their goals by studying where the failures and successes they have experienced in terms of those goals have led them.
In decision making, iteration is the consistent repetition of this process (for the Maple Leafs it takes place each off season) so that the team can generate a sequence of actions that brings them closer to the desired outcome (winning the Stanley Cup) .
Michael Bunting was a good addition to the Toronto Maple Leafs. (Richard Lautens / Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Each repetition of the process (for an NHL team, it’s a season and a low season) is a single iteration. And the result of each iteration (where the team is at the end of the season) then becomes the starting point for the next iteration (planning for the next season).
[As an aside, in computer science, algorithms work to build sets of instructions that tell a computer how to transform sets of facts about the world into information that can be used for decision-making. Specifically, this means taking the information gathered about what people did and the knowledge about how things happened and using it to instruct how to make better decisions.]
Is the team wrong? (Yes): Are you successful? (Yes)
Returning to the Maple Leafs, the team makes mistakes. Last low season, as fans we were excited that the team had signed striker Nick Ritchie and even goalkeeper Petr Mrazek. Those options did not work.
Related: Maple Leafs News and Rumors: Knies, Minten, and New Draft Strategy?
On the other hand, who knew much about Michael Bunting? Of course, he was lucky to score some goals with the Arizona Coyotes, but that percentage of shots would surely fall to the ground again. And who the hell would David Kampf sign from the Chicago Blackhawks junkyard? A striker who has only scored one goal in a season?
I even wrote a post about how defender Brennan Menell could become the team’s new power-play quarterback. Where is he now? Kurtis Gabriel brought his character to the team, then did not stay. Josh Ho-Sang has joined the KHL after his season with the Toronto Marlies.
Some of these players were purely occasions the team took, Ho-Sang, for example. But most were decisions the team made to see if it could address a prioritized need that was considered and decided as it looked back on the previous season. They were trying to answer what had happened, what they wanted to happen and what they could do to achieve the desired goal, with the resources they had.
A series of Maple Leafs head scrapers: get used to it
As a regular reader and commentator gcmgome pointed out (and I thank you for helping me generate this post), some of the moves Dubas makes as general manager seem like a cast of support draggers. gcmgome also noted that Dubas has not yet finished lifting stones and hitting the bushes. There will be more unforeseen additions, such as Jarnkrok, to come.
Related: Kyle Dubas, GM of Maple Leafs: Using Anger as a Negotiation Tactic
For me, not being in the room where the Maple Leafs decisions are made, it amazes me forever, apparently, by what happens. Will there be failures and mistakes? Of couse. Will there be successes? There have been some in the past.
Do I trust the process? Yes. I think that’s exactly what needs to be done.
To end with a final reflection from the gcmgome reader. “We can only hope that this year’s harvest of discards will bring in a few home runs.” For me, that’s part of the fun of covering this team.
Old Prof (Jim Parsons, Sr.) taught for over 40 years at the University of Alberta School of Education. He is a Canadian boy, with two degrees from the University of Kentucky and a doctorate from the University of Texas. He is now retired to Vancouver Island, where he lives with his family. His hobbies include playing with his hockey cards and just being a sports fan: hockey, the Toronto Raptors and CFL football (he thinks Ricky Ray personifies how a professional athlete should act).
If you’re wondering why he doesn’t use his real name, it’s because his son, who is also Jim Parsons, first wrote for The Hockey Writers and asked Jim Mr. that he use another name so that readers do not confuse his work.
Since Jim Sr. had worked in China, adopted the Mandarin word for teacher (老師). The first character lǎo (老) means “old” and the second character shī (師) means “master”. The literal translation of lǎoshī is “old master.” This became his pseudonym. Today, in addition to writing for The Hockey Writers, he teaches research design to graduate students at several Canadian universities.
He is looking forward to sharing his ideas about the Toronto Maple Leafs and how sport involves life more fully. His Twitter address is