SAULT STE. MARIE, Ont. — When Kyle Dubas interviewed to be the general manager of the Soo Greyhounds seven years ago, the one thing he brought with him was a 100-page binder.

In it was a meticulous and comprehensive plan for how he would transform the OHL franchise, which had fallen to the bottom of the Western Conference and hadn’t won a league title or Memorial Cup in almost 20 years.

Dubas’ detailed blueprint eventually became known in the organization as “The Rising” — a nod to the Bruce Springsteen album of the same name, a favourite of the new executive.

The binder — and the plan within — helped get Dubas hired, making him the second youngest GM in OHL history.

In his first address to Greyhounds fans, the then-25-year-old spelled out his mission, listing in a letter some of the same talking points he had used in his interview. He explained his belief system. He explained what he learned in various roles throughout hockey — from stickboy to scout to agent — and about achieving “sustained success.”

Much of the letter focused on the kind of people the Greyhounds would attract: those with “character” and “integrity” who attacked “adversity” head on.

Dubas also wrote that his age would be a “tremendous benefit — not a hindrance.”

In addition to the letter, Dubas released a mission statement on the team’s website, offering a window into how he viewed what had always been his dream job.

“This is not about a miracle turnaround,” he wrote. “This is not about quick fixes or grasping for salvation. This is about us confronting the brutal facts. This is about embracing adversity.

“This is about character, integrity, and passion.

“This is about restoring pride and prestige to the Greyhound logo.

“This is Soo Greyhounds Hockey.

“This is The Rising.”

Dubas signed his name at the bottom.



Chapter 1: Kyle and Walter
Kyle Dubas has never missed much when it comes to details, his sister Megan says.

As a kid, the Maple Leafs’ GM loved movies so much he would memorize lines from favourite flicks like Dick Tracy and Ghostbusters and then spit them out before the actors onscreen could, a habit that would drive their uncle nuts.

Dubas’ other obsession was sports. From a young age, he learned to memorize and recite hockey and baseball players’ biographies and statistics with remarkable precision.

Every Tuesday, he and his grandfather, Walter, would go to the newsstand at the local mall and buy a copy of Baseball Weekly. Dubas would flip to the back and start inhaling the numbers.

“He could just retain so much,” Megan Dubas said. “It was like ‘Where is he getting this from?'”

Dubas was highly competitive, too. His sister chuckles as she recalls some of the ferocious battles between them when it came to hockey, which they both began playing around age five.

Victor Carneiro, Dubas’ close friend and former colleague with the Greyhounds, saw that fire in him as an adult. During Dubas’ wedding week in Mexico, they were playing handball in the pool with some fellow resort-goers.

Dubas’ team lost and, in frustration, he punted the volleyball three stories into the sky.

“We just kind of stopped for a second and were like ‘Did we just see that?'” Carneiro said.

Dubas excelled in school from a young age, and he had an independent streak. Megan believes that was, in part, the product of their parents divorcing when Kyle was eight years old. Both parents worked full-time jobs with sometimes difficult hours: Mark as a police officer and Paula as an ambulance dispatcher.

That meant the three kids — Kyle and twin sisters Megan and Courtney — spent a lot of time with their grandparents. And a lot of time on their own.

Kyle, the eldest, and Walter became especially close thanks to their mutual love of hockey and baseball.

Walter Dubas certainly had a lot of knowledge to pass on, after a long career as a respected player and coach. In 1988 — three years after Kyle was born — his grandfather was inducted into the players’ wing of the Soo Greyhounds Hall of Fame. Walter Dubas’ picture still hangs among the greats at the Essar Centre, alongside other local heroes Ron Francis, Tony Esposito and Craig Hartsburg.

One of the things Walter Dubas was most well-known for was coaching a pre-OHL incarnation of the Greyhounds. Those teams won three straight regular-season titles and the McNamara Trophy in 1967 for the NOHA Junior A championship.


Baby Kyle and grandfather Walter, circa 1987.

Walter Dubas’ plaque at Essar Centre.
Decades later, Walter and Kyle would drive “Gramma Dubie” — as she’s known on Twitter — to work in the morning and soak up time together, often talking about sports. They went to many Greyhounds games together, with Walter providing analysis as the play unfolded.

Going to games with his grandfather was like being with a local celebrity: He was recognized everywhere at the rink given his years behind the team’s bench.

It was at those games that Walter Dubas helped establish the foundations of his grandson’s hockey knowledge, instilling in him, from an early age, the importance of intangibles like toughness and determination. He also instilled in him a love for the Greyhounds, the team that would be his early guiding light.

“They had a really close relationship,” Megan said.

Walter Dubas passed away at age 83 in the fall of 2012.

He suffered from dementia near the end, and his illness tore Kyle apart. He couldn’t mention his ailing grandfather when he was introduced as Greyhounds GM in 2011 for fear of breaking down.

He later said it was important to “follow his legacy and have the Dubas name associated with the Greyhounds again.”

“My grandfather was a very important person to me,” Dubas said in an email to The Athletic earlier this week. “The lessons and laughs that we gathered in our 27 years together are those that I think of each day. A lot of what I do and how I operate daily, in how I treat people and making each day as fun as possible, is because of him.

“I miss him each day and think about his guidance and advice continually as we ride the waves that come with the fortune of being employed in hockey.”


Kyle Dubas and his grandfather, Walter.
Unlike his grandfather, Kyle Dubas never had the chance to see his playing career through. He was forced to stop playing hockey at 14 due to a series of concussions.

The scariest incident left Dubas thinking it was two years earlier and unable to recall some basic details about family members. That was the end.

Dubas didn’t sulk or dwell on what was not to be. He found another way to get involved, launching himself further into a career in the game.

“What makes him unique is that he’ll never sit back and complain about something,” said Megan Dubas, who worked alongside her brother as the Greyhounds director of game-day operations and community relations. “He’s always so positive. He’s never made excuses for himself if he failed. He would never blame anyone else. He would take the responsibility for that. And his ability to learn and take everything in is unbelievable.”

Much of that experience first came with the Greyhounds, who sit at the heart of Sault Ste. Marie, a pretty town in northern Ontario with picturesque views of the St. Marys River and a population of around 70,000.

Support is ingrained in the city for a junior team that fell just shy of the OHL championship earlier this month. Shop windows all over town are still filled with big red signs bearing the Greyhounds logo.

The team was always front and centre for the Dubas family, who still have season tickets. Kyle Dubas started working for the organization at 11 years old, volunteering as a dressing room attendant and stickboy.

The Greyhounds’ team photos, tucked away in the arena’s basement, serve as a sort of annual album of his childhood, with Dubas gradually sprouting up and leaning out over the years. By the 2011-12 season — 14 years after he first joined the team — Dubas is wearing a suit and is the team’s GM, a clear sign of his remarkable progression.

Dave Torrie, a long-time Greyhounds scout and executive, remembers Dubas being around all the time in the early days, including at scouting meetings just before the draft. The precocious stickboy would listen intently to the staff talk hockey and then hustle out of the building for coffees when scouts needed them.

At first, Torrie figured Dubas just loved the Greyhounds. Maybe he couldn’t get enough of the team — even when it came to the off-ice stuff, like debating for hours and hours which prospect was best?

But Torrie quickly realized this wasn’t just about the Greyhounds. The kid was enamoured with hockey.

“If you didn’t kick him out of something, he was involved in it. That’s what always impressed me — this kid was always around,” Torrie said. “He would do whatever it took to hang around.”


Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Chapter 2: The scout
While other teenagers spent their college years partying or cramming for exams, Dubas dedicated his spare time as a student at Brock University’s sport management program to his second job in hockey: scouting for the Greyhounds.

Torrie, who had become GM, offered him the gig. He put aside the fact that Dubas was only 17, as anyone who had been around him knew that age was largely irrelevant. Dubas carried himself with the wisdom and maturity of someone much older.

“It wasn’t looking at him as a 17-year-old kid — it was just looking at him as any other guy that could make our team better,” said Torrie, now a pro scout for the Los Angeles Kings.

Torrie’s main concern was scouting would interfere with Dubas’ schoolwork. But even with classes, homework and the occasional bit of fun, Dubas attended the same slate of games as the Greyhounds other scouts. Torrie said his input was valued the same, too.

Those who know him well say Dubas always had a knack for compartmentalizing tasks that way — of not only getting everything done but done well and with precision.

“He had an incredible ability to push away all the distractions, all the noise, and focus,” said Phil Golding, a classmate at Brock who was the best man at Dubas’ wedding. “Whether that was getting an assignment done or handling a presentation or a big project, he was always the leader. He always had a lot of charisma.”

Torrie believes Dubas learned a lot about what it took for a player to succeed in the OHL by being around the dressing room for so many years as a stickboy. He was perceptive that way — understanding why some players hit and others missed.

Looking back, Torrie says Dubas viewed the game through a different lens from his more senior colleagues. He was more big-picture focused than most.

At the time, Torrie didn’t know what Dubas’ future in hockey would look like. He figured he might end up in management or become an agent. He recalls Dubas considering law school.

“I kind of felt at the time that his options were somewhat unlimited,” Torrie said.

Which is why Torrie wasn’t surprised when his replacement was “the kid.”

Torrie had been GM in the Soo for eight years when he was told his contract wouldn’t be renewed in the spring of 2011. Strangely, Lou Lukenda, the late Greyhounds president and majority owner, asked Torrie to coach a final game behind the bench that night anyway.

It was in those trying circumstances, facing the uncomfortable prospect of replacing a former boss and mentor, that Dubas found himself wary of even applying for the job. He called Torrie before the hiring process and asked for his advice and blessing after the Greyhounds reached out to gauge his interest.

“He showed way more respect than he had to,” said Torrie, who encouraged Dubas to apply. “I appreciated that at the time.”

Torrie had long believed something like this was coming for Dubas. At Sault Memorial Gardens, the Greyhounds’ home until 2006, the GM’s office had a big black leather chair. “I’d just keep telling him, ‘Kyle, I’m just keeping this chair warm till you’re ready for it.’ And he was ready for it,” Torrie said.

His only mistake was he thought Dubas would be running the Greyhounds for life.


Dubas, 25, becomes GM of the Soo Greyhounds in 2011.
Chapter 3: The Soo
Victor Carneiro joined the Greyhounds just before Dubas took over, having worked as a scout for Mark Hunter’s London Knights up until that point.

Like most within the Greyhounds organization, he knew who Dubas was. He had seen him frequently around the arena scouting. “It wasn’t like he was fresh out of school in this job and had no insight,” Carneiro said. “This was a guy who had already been in the league.”

That didn’t mean Dubas was beholden to the past.

Moneyball was released in theatres in the fall of his first season in charge. A line from the film — based on the 2003 book by Michael Lewis — became popular as a way of thinking about the Greyhounds’ future under his leadership: “Adapt or die.”

Just as Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane discovered how analytics could help his team win games in the film (and real life), Dubas believed numbers could be part of the way forward in hockey. Like the Athletics, the Greyhounds were a small-market squad. Dubas felt the organization had to exploit whatever margins they could to challenge behemoths like Windsor, London, and Kitchener for OHL titles.

“We didn’t have the same margin for error in our decision making,” Dubas said. “We incorporated in data — collecting it and using it — to supplement our decisions and to inform our decisions. I found it to be a great help in how I view the game, in how I watch the game and how I scout the game, and then to correct me when I’m going way down the wrong path.”

In doing so, Dubas became a pioneer in the hockey world. He established an analytics department with the Greyhounds, which focused largely on tracking how much their team kept the puck.

Getting that relatively simple data was a lot more work than it is today.

The OHL only kept a time log for goals and penalties at that point, which meant staff needed to not only count shot attempts but determine which players were on the ice for each and every one of them.

Tyson Enfield, an intern completing his degree in the same sports management program that Dubas attended, was tasked with getting the Greyhounds’ counting program off the ground. He was assisted by Matt Rodell, another intern from Brock.

Rodell remembers retreating to the basement of the Essar Centre after games, pulling up the game video and then jotting down when shot attempts happened. He would then align those numbers with a free time-on-ice program that Enfield found and compile reports for Dubas and the coaching staff.

It took several hours for each game.

“It was mind-numbing,” Rodell said. “But at the same time, you saw purpose in it.”

Dubas had a plan for employing the data, but a lot of the tracking and analysis was experimental. One question became: What was the proper sample size before they could draw conclusions? Three games? Six?

Once they had the numbers, they only invited more questions.

“‘Why is this happening the way it is? Why are we trending the way we are?’ And from there you dig deeper,” said Rodell, now the Greyhounds manager for analytics and ticket sales and also the video coach.

Rob Pettapiece — now an analyst on the Leafs’ research and development staff — joined the Greyhounds’ nascent analytics effort to help streamline the process. His mathematics background helped them drastically improve the turnaround time for the stats to be assessed and digested.

The numbers didn’t make decisions for Dubas and the Greyhounds. But they helped inform them what was working and what wasn’t and why.

“Now most OHL teams have people tracking stuff, whether it be live or based off scraping data,” Carneiro said. “But at the time it was just one of those things where Kyle figured, ‘Listen, this is an advantage we can use.'”

Years later, Carneiro chuckles when some in the hockey world reduce Dubas to “a stats guy.” He knows him as a seasoned scout, someone who was spending entire days at the rink before he was old enough to see a PG-13 movie.

“I think he has the old school, new school thing down,” Torrie said. “And I think that’s why you see him in a position he’s in today, at 32.”

Torrie has been in the same NHL press box as Dubas often in recent years. He uses that time to pepper him with questions about analytics, knowing that Dubas is at the forefront of a movement that will only grow in prominence in the evaluation of players.

All these years later, he is trying to learn from his former protege.

“He was just smart enough and he was at a point in his life where he was able to grasp another aspect of the game that a lot of us are trying to pick up on,” Torrie said. “From guys like him.”


Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP
Chapter 4: The numbers game
Walter Dubas would often ask his grandson the same question, about a wide range of things, when they spent time together.

“How does it all work, Kyle?”

Analytics were like a window into how hockey worked, a tool for looking past what seemed apparent on the surface. As Dubas explained at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2015, “your eyes and your mind — they’re lying sons of bitches in the worst absolute way.”

Speaking for 24 minutes in a presentation titled “How Analytics has Limited the Impact of Cognitive Bias on Personnel Decisions,” Dubas — then a recent addition to the Leafs’ front office — detailed how statistics could help avoid poor decisions.

He talked about bias toward events in recent memory — the so-called recency bias. He talked about a bias toward simplicity — or an overestimation of players that “keep it simple.”

He explained how he eventually grew to despise the idea of the so-called “simple game,” recalling a conversation with another scout in the Soo.

The scout wanted to know why Dubas didn’t like a certain player. “Well, I don’t think he’s very good,” Dubas responded, relaying the conversation during his presentation at Sloan.

“You need a player like him to win,” the scout said. “He keeps it simple. When the game is on the line, you can count on him.”

At the time, Dubas figured his colleague must be right. He started integrating similar analysis into his own reports. Eventually, he realized the error was leaning toward something that’s easy to explain.

The imposing defenceman who throws the puck off the glass and hits everything in sight? It’s easy to see what he offers.

But is it helpful to winning? Or is that player just forcing his team to defend, again and again?

Dubas had a love of numbers from those early days with his grandfather and found himself delving into their meaning and application in high school and university.

“He’s not afraid of adapting,” Carneiro said, noting Dubas’ fondness at one point for blocked shots and his likely evolution on the measurement since that point. “That’s one thing he always stressed to us: You always gotta adapt. You always gotta question everything.”

Dubas found that making the numbers matter meant presenting them in a way that made them understandable for all. If you can’t explain the data then what use will it be for coaches or scouts?

“If your president, general manager, coach, scouts — everybody buys into using what you can gain from statistics and analytics, you’re going to have a lot more success than if you have one person on your staff — alone — saying ‘This is important’ and trying to gather buy-in from everybody else,” Dubas explained at Sloan.

Dubas didn’t have that at first with the Greyhounds. Though they were tracking numbers in the basement, it was only when Sheldon Keefe replaced Mike Stapleton as head coach midway through Dubas’ second season that the organization felt truly bought into the value numbers could offer.

Stapleton was Dubas’ first coaching hire in the Soo, but they sparred with regard to style of play. Once hired, Keefe — a championship-winning coach with the Pembroke Lumber Kings — was on-board with devising a strategy which would allow them to control the puck more.

And that’s when the Greyhounds began to win.

“Sheldon pushed us as much or more than Kyle to get more numbers,” said Enfield, who got the analytics program started with Dubas.

Dubas explained at Sloan that in the first 30 games of that 2012-13 season, with Stapleton running the bench, the Greyhounds were a 47 per cent possession team. After Keefe took charge, with the same group of players, they hit 57 per cent and made the playoffs.

“It was night and day,” said Rodell, who was tracking the numbers. “For us, it turned into ‘We need to maintain possession and this is how we’re going to do it.'”



It also meant seeking out players who better fit that style.

“We were never concerned about size,” said Carneiro, who was promoted to head scout in the Soo in 2013.

Ideally, Carneiro explained, every team will take the bigger player — if all things are equal. “But we were not going to sacrifice speed and skill just for the sake of size. We moved more towards drafting skilled players who were smart.”

Consider that, in the four OHL drafts prior to Dubas’ arrival as GM, the Greyhounds took exactly one player — among 63 picks — listed below 5-foot-9. In Dubas’ four drafts as GM, they took 13 — including five in 2011.

It wasn’t an easy direction to take in the Soo, where fans adored big, tough teams. Fighting was still rampant in junior. The Boston Bruins had won the Stanley Cup that year with a heavy, abrasive squad, and the L.A. Kings had followed them a year later with the first of two titles in three years.

But the Greyhounds, with coach and GM now on the same page, proved to be ahead of the curve. They jumped 14 points in the standings that first year with Keefe on board before falling in the first round of the playoffs. A year later, they finished second in the entire OHL with 95 points — 17 more than the previous season and the most from a Soo squad in decades.

Dubas left to join the Leafs that summer, but his impact on the organization continued to be felt for years.

The Greyhounds set what was then a franchise-record with 110 points in the first season after Dubas’ departure. This past season, the franchise bettered that mark, hitting 116 points and advancing all the way to the OHL championship.

It was their first appearance in the final in 25 years.

Prominent players from Dubas’ final OHL draft were influential in the latest run, including Boris Katchouk and Jack Kopacka, who scored 31 goals in the regular season and 13 more in the playoffs.

That success has made the Greyhounds a more attractive destination for prospects. The Soo, an eight-hour drive northwest of Toronto, wasn’t always an easy sell before that.

The Rising had worked.



Chapter 5: The school
At Brock, they call it “The Dubas effect.”

Since Dubas graduated in 2007 and advanced again and again as a hockey executive, the school’s sports management program has attracted more and more followers. Originally 350 students, it will now admit more than 900 this fall.

“We absolutely have seen, anecdotally, so many students who want to be Kyle Dubas when they graduate,” associate professor Kirsty Spence said.

Spence oversaw Dubas’ summer internship with the Greyhounds — where he developed training camp for new recruits — and then taught him more directly in a course on leadership before graduation.

Golding, who became the assistant GM of the Guelph Storm after his time at Brock, remembers Dubas being outspoken in class and eager to take the lead in many group projects. The two lived together in a house off campus, and even though Dubas would spend endless nights scouting OHL games, he was often first in getting a jump on the day.

“He would get my ass out of bed,” Golding said.

Dubas has remained an active ambassador for Brock’s program, including offering to instruct or serve as a teacher’s assistant when he was an agent.

As a student, Spence said Dubas displayed many traits which made him an effective leader: complexity in thinking, rich interpersonal skills, and a strong morality base.

Carneiro explained that one of Dubas’ strengths is he is so approachable. At the Soo, he would share exact details of his schedule so that staff knew when they could reach him and how. He also wasn’t averse to taking criticism — or doling it out, if warranted — and made it known to the people that worked for him that he was open to new ideas.

“To this day Kyle is the best leader I have worked for,” said Enfield, the Greyhounds one-time analytics manager.

Dubas is well-known among colleagues and friends for sharing articles that catch his eye — whether they relate to sports or not. A soccer fanatic, Carneiro remembers Dubas sending him one story that detailed Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola’s desire for grass to be cut a certain way on the team’s home pitch.

Dubas was zeroing in on how elite organizations paid attention to even the smallest details.

“He listens,” Carneiro said. “He takes in information from people he works with. I think the biggest thing is he’s very process driven. Sometimes when things may not be working out well, he knows not to panic or make snap decisions. That was one thing: We never really made snap decisions in the Soo — it was always well thought out.”

Carneiro believes part of what has made Dubas so divisive in the hockey world is his willingness to push back against conventional thinking. For one, he wants his players and personnel to be themselves and let their personalities shine through.

“People perceive that as a negative,” Carneiro said of Dubas’ willingness to embrace change. “That’s part of the problem in hockey: There’s too much change and people get their backs up.

“I’m not saying he’s the saviour in that manner, but I think when people are criticizing him, it’s not because he’s not a hockey guy. It’s because, with him, there will be some change. And some people don’t like change.”


Andrew Campbell, right, as Marlies captain. Graig Abel/Getty Images
Chapter 6: The agent
It was 2007 when Craig Hartsburg, then the Greyhounds head coach, told Andrew Campbell to find an agent. NHL teams were starting to call.

Campbell, a defenceman who was eventually drafted by the Kings in the third round, reached out to Dubas. They were around the same age and had become friendly during Dubas’ days scouting for the organization.

Campbell saw him as an up-and-comer. He didn’t care that Dubas, who had become a certified agent at 20, was inexperienced.

“I think I had a good read on how hard of a worker he was and the bright future that he had,” said Campbell, the former Toronto Marlies captain and current defenceman for the Tucson Roadrunners.

The thing he appreciated the most was Dubas’ ability to be brutally honest.

“There was no grey — it was always black and white,” Campbell explained. “He told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear… I think you need to be told the truth. You need to know exactly where you stand. If you need to fix something, you’re told to fix it. There’s no beating around the bush (with Kyle).”

Torrie was still running the Greyhounds in those days. So Dubas would call his former boss and inquire about things like playing time for his clients, who included Campbell and fellow Greyhounds Dustin Jeffrey and Brandon Archibald.

“We’d talk,” Torrie recalled of his conversations with Dubas the agent. “And I’d say, ‘Well, Kyle, if you were in my position would you be playing this guy over this guy and that guy? You’re the GM. You’re trying to win games. What would you do?'”

What made the relationship work was Dubas’ big picture approach and experience working on the other side of the operation.

Torrie hopes Dubas won’t be pinned down as a “young GM” with the Leafs, unfairly picked apart for mistakes that an older executive might catch a break on. Torrie, who is 52 and started working in the game in his early 20s, believes his level of experience isn’t all that different from Dubas, given his start with the Greyhounds at such a young age.

“I look at him as a peer,” Torrie said. “At some point, you forget about his age. You look at him — you know he’s young. He appears young and everything. But you just can take that and throw it out the window because of his knowledge and his experience goes beyond his age.”


Dubas in the Marlies coaches office with the WWE championship belt.
Chapter 7: The Leafs
It was during that wedding week in Mexico in the summer of 2014 that Dubas first heard from Brendan Shanahan.

“He tossed the phone over and was like, ‘Hey, look at this. This is unbelievable,'” Golding recalled of the moment Dubas was contacted by the Leafs president.

Shanahan had taken control of the Leafs only a few months earlier and was having some exploratory conversations. He wasn’t reaching out with a job offer, just a chance to talk hockey.

He’d heard a lot about Dubas and was curious.

“It was probably my attempt at the time to just mine some information from someone that I heard was one of the bright young minds coming up in the game,” Shanahan said.

Similarly, Dubas was always on the hunt for fresh ideas. He figured he might pick up a thing or two from the Hall of Famer, the kind of advice or direction that might benefit the Greyhounds program in the coming season.

The conversation during their first meeting ended up lasting nine hours. By the end, Shanahan was trying to convince Dubas to leave the Soo and take an as-yet-undetermined role with the Leafs.

Four years later, Shanahan chose Dubas to replace Lou Lamoriello as the team’s 17th general manager. Noting Dubas’ thorough grasp of all parts of the organization and willingness to embrace various roles — “No job was too big. No job was too small” — Shanahan said he was particularly impressed with how Dubas ran the Toronto Marlies.

The AHL squad had not only become a proper feeder for the Leafs but a winner, too.

“To strike that balance, of being able to develop hockey players so that as many as possible can seamlessly transition to the Maple Leafs… I think what’s been equally impressive is that he’s still maintained a successful team down there as well,” Shanahan said.

Megan Dubas learned her brother had gotten the Leafs’ GM job a day before the official announcement on May 11. She had been peppered with questions about it from family and friends in the Soo ever since the Leafs announced Lamoriello wouldn’t be returning as GM.

But the family knew, at some point, this was coming. That became clear as soon as he took over the Greyhounds.

And, really, for a long while before that.

“He’s always been so driven,” Megan Dubas said. “Once he has goals, he wants to reach them — and he wants to even push further. He’s always just been so driven.”