There are 48 books on Kyle Dubas’s bookshelf when we sit down, not counting the two he is reading, which sit partly underlined at his desk.

Dubas believes you can’t just read a book; you have to physically mark the parts that matter, as signposts of what’s important. Right now he is reading Ian O’Connor’s book on Bill Belichick, near a framed poster of Belichick on the floor with the words: Ignore The Noise. The poster was a gift from assistant director of player personnel Wes Clark. Dubas has had it a long time.

“That’s a weak collection of my books,” says the 32-year-old general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, in his 15th-floor office. “My good books are at home. Not good books, but …”

In May, Dubas was elevated to GM after team president Brendan Shanahan let league godfather — and near-surrogate hockey father — Lou Lamoriello walk. As Shanahan put it at the time, “The decisions that I’ve made, knowing the repercussions of those decisions, are all based on things I’ve observed, judgments I’ve made, firsthand, behind the closed doors here.”

Shanny kept receipts. Lou’s early work with the Islanders has merely confirmed it.

So Dubas is in the big chair at one of the most critical junctures in franchise history. The core of talent almost glows: Auston Matthews should be a perennial Hart candidate, Mitch Marner and William Nylander are merely special, then Morgan Rielly, Nazem Kadri, Jake Gardiner — your mileage may vary there — a fleet of young skaters, a goalie who might be enough. Oh, and summer addition John Tavares. There are eight NHL centres who scored at least 30 goals in each of the past two years. The Leafs have three.

But in the NHL, talent comes with problems. Nylander was unsigned as of press time. That deal, and contract extensions for Matthews and Marner, will shape this team’s future as much as anything short of health.

“It’s the massive part of it,” says Dubas. “I think that in the end, when you look all throughout sports, the players want to stay in a place where they feel like they are having their potential maximized, that they have a chance to win, and that they enjoy coming to every day. This is my first year in this world, being able to develop my own version of it, like Lou had his, and Dave Nonis had his before that, and so on and so forth.

“But that’s going to be a major thing. So if the players want to make it work here, we have to build a program that they want to be a part of. And then I also think that there are advantages to being in Toronto, which can mitigate some of the other losses that they may take versus what they think their market value is worth.”

Sales job, eh? Make them believe. What about once they’re signed?

“Well, I think that the pressure goes to me,” Dubas says, “as it should.”

As John le Carré once wrote, some people act a memory; some people have one. “His memory is amazing,” says one Leafs employee who also worked with Dubas with the Marlies. “He’ll say, I remember the night we went out to dinner in Utica, and he’ll remember the name of the microbrew we drank.”

So the books are resources. Everything is. In the Soo, Dubas and his co-workers devoured and shared what they could on other sports; the Tampa Bay Rays, the New England Patriots, the San Antonio Spurs, Manchester City or Barcelona. They exchanged readings on Johan Cruyff’s song of beautiful, attacking, hounding soccer, and those who inherited it: Pep Guardiola or Jurgen Klopp. Belichick was admired for his organizational excellence, and San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich for his ability to do that and remain a whole human.

So some of the books you’d expect to be on the shelf of someone who is trying to expand their mind in a competitive landscape. A Malcolm Gladwell (Blink), three by Michael Lewis but none of them Moneyball, Nate Silver’s The Signal And The Noise. He has Bill James’s original Abstract and a Handbook, and plenty on leadership, thinking, stoicism — Meditations by Marcus Aurelius — and success.

But of those 48 books, five are about hockey: Four from hockey analyst Rob Vollman’s stable of analytics work — he recently joined the L.A. Kings — and Bob McKenzie’s Hockey Confidential. Dubas contributed a back-page blurb to Vollman’s latest. Dubas believes in the church of hockey, and also believes there are other teachings. He won’t say it, but in hockey that can be heresy.

“I don’t think I have a defined view of anything,” says Dubas. “People try to define the way I look at things. But I always look at it as, it is always in development … We always have to be adapting.”

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Dubas’s drive for self-improvement has propelled him since he was a stick boy for the Greyhounds in Sault Ste. Marie. The common thread to all this is process: day by day, week by week, building towards a bigger goal. Dubas added anonymity to his search for positions and came up with former Minnesota State player Noelle Needham as a scout, based only on the merit of her evaluations. He talked that day about if you only hire white males, you’re missing out on something. Hockey is the whitest, most male-dominated sport this side of baseball.

Dubas employed this inclusive, searching nature when he was running the Greyhounds, and then the Marlies. When the Marlies won the Calder Cup last year, Dubas famously howled on the ice, and afterwards he talked about how it meant more because of the people who had completed the journey with him.

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Dubas is different, the way Shanahan was. As TSN’s Ray Ferraro said of Dubas, “He’s very rare — I think his biggest asset is he’s curious, is open to new ideas.” One thing that separates Dubas is, he shares his ideas with his players and staff the way a 32-year-old would. He texts them links — podcasts, articles, tweets, maybe a picture of a page from a book, maybe underlined.

“Yeah, I always just think that if it’s something that might be helpful,” says Dubas. “Sometimes it’s a player that struggles, or (has) been struggling, and it’s experiences of something that I read of someone else who has gone through a similar situation where they’ve struggled. I don’t know, I just think that everyone here, I know you’re here because you’re a player, or you work for the Toronto Maple Leafs, but they all have their individual lives.

“And my thought has always been that if I have an interest in helping every single person who works here — whether they’re a player or a staff member, whomever — the onus is on me to ultimately help them reach their potential, whatever that may be.”

So some players got the Bill Simmons podcast where Steph Curry talked about building a champion with a core, and then absorbing an outside star in Kevin Durant. (That was the one goaltender Frederik Andersen remembered best.) Morgan Rielly talked with Dubas on a summer day about, as he put it, “the longevity of our opportunity,” and a week later got a link to a tweet with a video about another NHL team’s challenges dealing with the salary cap.

“There was no context given,” said Rielly. “I watched it and I texted him back and all I said was thanks, got it. At the time I texted him back I didn’t know what the context was. And then I went, oh, I talked to him about this.”

“I’m always like, how do you have time for all that?” says one Leafs employee, half-joking. “He’s always trying to get better. I don’t have time to get better. I’m just trying to tread water. I have a family. I mean, I am trying to get better, but I don’t know where he gets the energy.”

“We’re not getting carried away with it: it’s mostly about our team and the sport,” says Rielly. “But it’s goal-based, most of it’s process based … It’s refreshing because in sports, especially in this game, you can kind of beat a dead horse a little bit, where you come in and just talk about all the clichés. You know, the way you’re supposed to play and get pucks deep and all that. It’s good to get a little bit of fresh air.

“There’s much more to what he’s doing than just group-texting people, you know, but he’s really taking steps to assert himself. He’s got a unique perspective on everything. For a guy like myself who has been around a mix of personalities — old school and new school, guys who love hockey more than anything — to speak with him about the process and creating a culture, non-cliché type conversations, is pretty cool. I think he has a great idea of what he wants to do and a unique way of getting there.”

“I think he wants to build us to build a mindset of where we’re at, and what we can become,” says Andersen. “Ask any hockey player, I don’t think you’re going to find one guy that wouldn’t want to win a Cup. So it’s about, how do we get to the goal before that, take the steps before that? Because that’s not the first step. You’ve got to find goals every day, every week and every month throughout the year. And I’ve been here for two years now, and we’re still learning from stuff we learned here one week, this year.”

It’s little things, hoping they add up to the bigger ones. Dubas approved of Marner’s camouflage suit and tiger-print shoes at a pre-season game in Lucan, and he is encouraging players to extricate themselves from the old Lamoriello straitjacket, within reason.

“I think he knows if we enjoy ourselves we’ll play better, and obviously enjoy being here more,” says Marner. “That’s what you need. You need someone who’s willing to let you have that freedom and fun, but at the same time making sure if you’re getting too far out of it, that you’re getting tightened up and pulled back in.”

Dubas is different. One thread that runs through all those books about success and philosophy and lessons, of course — the Warriors, the Spurs, the Patriots, the Astros, the Cubs, Bill Walsh’s 49ers — is they had surpassing talent, and management that was smart, found marginal advantages. And didn’t screw it up. For a long time, for a very long time, the Toronto Maple Leafs have been sunk by hockey men of all stripes who were too impatient, too blinkered or too greedy, in ownership’s case. It’s been 51 Cupless years now, and the new era has started. Kyle Dubas is in the big chair, and his job is simple, really: figure out which parts matter and which parts don’t. And make everybody believe.

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