Kyle Dubas wasn't even a full 24 hours removed from being told that his expiring contract as general manager of the Maple Leafs would not be renewed. It was early the next morning on May 20, and he was on the phone with a member of the staff in Toronto when his phone started beeping with a call on the other line.
It was a 617 area code -- Boston. Dubas picked up the call and it was Sam Kennedy -- one of the Penguins' alternate governors and a member of Fenway Sports Group who also serves as president and CEO of the Red Sox. Kennedy told Dubas that the Penguins had received permission to interview Dubas for one of the openings in the Penguins' hockey operations department. It took some encouragement from his wife Shannon, but Dubas accepted the offer to speak with the Penguins fairly quickly.
The news that the Penguins had permission to speak with Dubas quickly became public, and that's when Dubas started hearing from the skeptics.
"I heard a lot of people that were highly skeptical of the team's ability to contend here," Dubas told me at his introductory press conference at PPG Paints Arena on Thursday.
Dubas disagreed with the noise.
"The way I view it is that if people want to bet against Mike Sullivan, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Kris Letang and others, they can go ahead and do so," Dubas said. "But I'm going to bet on them and go with them here. So I do think that it's a group capable of contending to win a championship."
Dubas' belief in the Penguins, encouraging conversations with Sullivan, Crosby and Fenway Sports Group, and getting sold on the city of Pittsburgh by members of the Penguins' front office led to him accepting the job and formally being named president of hockey operations on Thursday. In his introductory press conference, Dubas shed some light on his outlook on the Penguins and their future, and some clarity on the hiring process.
The day after Dubas agreed to speak with the Penguins, he was in Boston at the home of Fenway Sports Group principal owner and Penguins governor John Henry, as was chairman Tom Werner, co-head of Fenway Sports Management Dave Beeston, and Kennedy, who all serve as Penguins alternate governors. Dubas called it a "remarkable meeting, in terms of hearing the way that they view a sports organization, the way that they wanted to build things out, the short-term competitiveness, but the long-range capacity to build an organization that can sustain success."
I reported early in the process on May 23 -- two days after that initial meeting with Fenway Sports Group -- that Dubas was in town at the Penguins' practice facility along with Crosby and members of the Penguins' communications staff.
Those meetings -- along with another meeting with Sullivan -- were instrumental in Dubas taking the job in Pittsburgh.
"What I wanted to be able to have a discussion with Sidney about was where he felt the team was at more than anything, to sit with him and ensure that winning was still the No. 1 thing for him," Dubas explained. "It was very evident in talking to him that winning is his major focus every day. That's what I want to hear. Because I think that can have a massive impact on raising the level of the players that come in behind as prospects or younger players that we're able to acquire here in the next stretch. His character and that of the group can reduce the amount of time in the gap between what's now and what's next."
Dubas came away from his meeting with Sullivan impressed with him, too.
"If we can do good work on the long-term building, Sully can coach forever," Dubas said. "He's a great coach. So there's no real expiration date on Mike."
That made the Penguins an appealing team if Dubas wanted to work in a front office again. But in his comments in his season-ending press conference in Toronto, he wasn't sure if he wanted to work elsewhere just yet. He has a young family -- wife Shannon, a six-year-old son Leo and two-year-old daughter Lennon. Dubas knew he wanted to work in hockey again, and that wasn't going to be in Toronto. That meant that he was going to have to move eventually. The conversation Dubas had with his wife was that it would be best to move the family now, before the children got "too entrenched" in life in Toronto.
The job with the Penguins was appealing -- but was Pittsburgh the right spot for Dubas and his young family?
Dubas went back to Toronto after his initial visit to Pittsburgh and came back over Memorial Day weekend with his family, a trip he called "the closer" for the deal." The Penguins' senior vice president of communications Jennifer Bullano Ridgley and director of team operations Jason Seidling showed the Dubas family around Pittsburgh, and sold the city so well that Werner remarked in Thursday's press conference that Bullano Ridgley could "become the president of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce" if she ever left the Penguins.
Dubas said that his family felt "extraordinarily comfortable" in Pittsburgh over the weekend, and it was early this week that he decided to accept the job with the Penguins.
"All of those boxes were checked," Dubas said. "The family side, the people that I'd be working for and with, the people in the organization I met were incredible. Everybody in the city that we interacted with was incredible. Then once Jen and Jason were great with showing us around we all became very comfortable with the idea. So (taking a job this summer) wasn't the intention going in, but seeing that we were going to have to move anyway, you never know if you pass on this if an opportunity to work with these people and for a city like this and a group like this going to be available. So then we jumped in today with both feet."
The intention is still to continue to search a general manager who will report to Dubas, but Dubas acknowledged that it may be difficult to get permission to speak with some of the potential candidates at this time of year. In the interest of being thorough and wanting to speak with candidates who may not have permission to interview until July, Dubas will assume the role of interim general manager in the meantime. While it's not a given that a separate general manager will be hired, Dubas said that a potential candidate would be "progressive" and can add a skillset to the group that Dubas might not have himself.
Where Dubas really excels is in hockey analytics, a reputation he developed while managing the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in the OHL.
"What I came to deeply appreciate was that the data and objective information can provide you with a lot of a lot of detail, and a lot of great insights that you can use to make better decisions," Dubas said.
Dubas met with the Penguins' analytics department briefly on Thursday afternoon -- a group that include senior data scientist Katerina Wu, data scientist Caleb Peña, and data engineer Jacob Pavlovich. Dubas said that his initial impressions are that those members have "great reputations," but is still in the process of assessing the group. He said that if the conclusion is that the group could benefit from being built out further, Fenway Sports Group is willing to foot the bill to hire additional staff.
That doesn't mean that Dubas and the analytics department are going to spend their time holed up in an office somewhere, pouring over spreadsheets and making decisions off of them like a scene out of Moneyball. The goal is to integrate the data with other information from the rest of the hockey operations staff.
"I think that data and analytics can help to serve player personnel, player development, high performance, in addition to systems and tactics, and whatever Sully and the coaching staff need," Dubas said. "It'll be trying to integrate them all."
Dubas is beginning the process of assessing the needs of this team. While he thinks that the window to win is open, he says that he'd like to build out the depth to "supplement the greatness" that players like Crosby, Malkin and Letang already bring to the group. He thinks some of those depth pieces are already in place, but they'd like to work on adding to that over the coming weeks.
Another decision that needs to be made is in regard to the No.1 goaltender for next season, with Tristan Jarry set to become an unrestricted free agent this summer. Dubas is going to rely on insight from Sullivan, goaltending coach Andy Chiodo, and getting to know Jarry himself, before making a decision on what happens with Jarry. If they assess the trade options and free agents available and Jarry is the the best option out there, then they'd look to sign Jarry to a new contract.
One of the first orders of business on the table is the draft, which will be held June 28 and 29 in Nashville, Tenn. The Penguins' amateur scouting department remains intact, led by director of amateur scouting Nick Pryor. The scouts met in Pittsburgh last week for draft preparations and will continue to meet over the next several weeks. Dubas will rely on their insight heading into the draft. As far as the existing prospect pool and depth options at the pro level, Dubas will rely on the knowledge of the Penguins' coaching staff and the coaching staff in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton to assess the needs and strengths.
From continuing to build out the hockey operations staff, adding to the NHL roster, and building up the prospect pool, Dubas has a hefty workload ahead of him. His goal -- and the goal of Fenway Sports Group -- is to find a way to balance the focus on winning now while also preparing the team for long-term success down the line.
"I see this task ahead of us as a two-pronged effort," Dubas said. "In the short run, it's continuing to make decisions that are going to allow the team to be competitive, while the core group of players that have led the team through championships in the past continue to perform at the levels that they have for as long as they can and make decisions that will support them in lineup every night. That will allow the team to contend with each season while those players are with us. At the same time, the work will also begin at delivering a long-term hockey organization that can be the class of the NHL."
Dubas' introductory press conference was impressive, and initial impressions are that he was a home run of a hire by Fenway Sports Group to lead the hockey operation department.
The search to replace Brian Burke and Ron Hextall as the leaders of the Penguins' hockey operations department took nearly two months. But once Fenway Sports Group located their ideal candidate, things moved along fairly quickly with ownership, existing staff and players, and some part-time tour guides on the communications staff coming together to help make the hire happen.
Fenway Sports Group got their guy.
"I think the process was a massive success, because we're sitting here right now with Kyle," Beeston said. "We're really happy. We ran a robust search as everyone was aware of. We took our time because we wanted to get it right, not to do it quickly. We're really, really happy with what ended up."
