One move made by Former GM Kyle Dubas of the Toronto Maple Leafs, or rather not made, is creeping back up after a recent major contract.
The Carolina Hurricanes extended star forward Seth Jarvis to an eight-year, $63M extension. The signing was tough news for fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs, knowing he was taken 13th overall, originally belonging to Toronto.
To understand the leadup to this move, you have to go back to 2017. In free agency, the Maple Leafs, then run by veteran GM Lou Lamiorello, signed veteran forward Patrick Marleau to a three-year contract.
The move made sense to add an offensive veteran to a young forward group including Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner & William Nylander, all still in the infancy of their pro careers. The shocker was the price.
The Leafs signed Patrick Marleau to a three-year deal for $6.25M per season. While still one of the top players of his era, Marleau was 38 years old and only had 46 points the season prior with the San Jose Sharks, although with 27 goals.
Two years later, Marleau would be moved out as Lou Lamiorello was out the door and young GM Kyle Dubas stepped in, hoping to reverse what the team felt was an error.
Maple Leafs ended up trading Marleau, along with the 13th pick and a 7th rounder to the Carolina Hurricanes for a sixth round pick. Carolina instantly bought out Marleau, who had 37 points in 82 games for the Leafs, making sense the low return for Toronto.
Now with the emergence of Seth Jarvis as a top young player, Leafs fans feel a bit unhappy at how things transpired leading to them losing their chance at Jarvis.
At the time, Seth Jarvis looked like someone who could potentially be the real deal. As a draft eligible, Jarvis was second in WHL scoring with 98 points in just 58 games. His 1.69PPG was 2nd among draft eligible WHLers in the post-NHL lockout era, behind Sam Reinhart, and above top picks in Leon Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins & Nolan Patrick.
There were two concerns with Jarvis at the time being his smaller size at 5'10, which his then team, the Portland Winterhawks, had success with but with translatability not having the best track rate, and questions if Jarvis could play center. Carolina trusted in the rapidly improving Jarvis, and it paid off.
Ultimately, Toronto gained the 15th pick from the Pittsburgh Penguins in a deal that returned Kasperi Kapanen to the Pens, where he was drafted. The Toronto Maple Leafs selected Rodion Amirov.
Amirov was a top ranked forward out of Russia, having played 21 KHL games for UFA, as well as 10 goals and 22 games in the Russian junior hockey league. Amirov was a mature and hard-working player who could get points on the board as both a goalscorer and playmaker.
After a modest DY+1, in 2022, Amirov was announced to have been diagnosed with a brain tumor that would take him out from the game while he recieved chemotherapy outside of Russia. Amirov would not play hockey again.
Articles in the summer reported the positive developments in Amirov's health and the hope among those in the industry for the Russian to resume his career. To the people closest to him, they knew this would not be the case. On August 14,.2023, Rodion Amirov passed away, his brain cancer unoperable.
It's important to acknowledge that the passing of Amirov clouds what could have been for Toronto. Fellow Russian Nikita Grebenkin is now headed to North America after being one of the top young players in the KHL, Amirov very well could've already been in the system now, but we'll never know.
Vitali Kravtsov, drafted ninth overall by the Vancouver Canucks in 2019, a year prior to Amirov, put up much more promising DY+1 numbers, Kravtsov having 20PTS in 51GP vs Amirov's 13 in 39.
One player you can look at favorably is Andrei Kuzmenko, who had just 3 points in 12 games for CSKA Moscow, although it's a much deeper team, and Kuzmenko was a late bloomer.
It's hard to fairly assess if Toronto made a questionable mistake passing on Jarvis for Amirov because it's just not a fair comparison given the fact Amirov tragically was robbed of a chance. As for analyzing the draft selection itself, a lot of teams had fair concerns about Jarvis, but a lot of them too were the result of overthinking and viewing Jarvis too much in the context of the Pottland system.
Should the Toronto Maple Leafs have kept their pick at 13? Maybe, but would they have taken Seth Jarvis? Who knows? For all we know, Toronto may have still focused on Amirov as their man and went for the Russian forward there, passing on Jarvis still.
The truth is that Kyle Dubas reversed what was one of the most questionable acquisitions of the Lou Lamiorello era, and unfortunately, even under an already tough circumstance, things did not go in Toronto's favor. But for the moving of Patrick Marleau, Kyle Dubas did what he had to do to restart the Toronto Maple Leafs identity, at an unfortunate, and unlucky cost.
