Details on the split between Brendan Shanahan and Kyle Dubas.

The Toronto Maple Leafs shocked their fan base on Friday when team president Brendan Shanahan announced that he had now fired former Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas just earlier that same morning.

There are now a ton of questions to be asked and answered about the future moving forward for the Maple Leafs franchise, but before we get to those new details are emerging about what led to this split between Dubas and the organization.

For several weeks, even prior to the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs, there had been rumblings of a growing divide between Dubas and his superior in Shanahan and it would now seem those rumblings were well founded. In a recent article for The Athletic, Maple Leafs reporter James Mirtle shed some light on what may have led to some of the friction between two of the most powerful men in the Leafs organization at the time.

From Mirtle:

As reported previously in the aftermath of the Leafs elimination, Shanahan and Dubas had been at odds for a while. On Friday, more details emerged on that front. Multiple sources close to the team said that Shanahan had blocked transactions that Dubas wanted to make at key points in the past several seasons, creating frustration in parts of the management group. Shanahan had also at times dictated certain moves he wanted made that Dubas didn’t agree with.

That is an explosive report from Mirtle and one that clearly states that Shanahan played a direct role in hindering Dubas' ability to do his job to the full extent that he so desired. This also raises questions about whether or not this very issue was addressed in the counter offer presented by Dubas' agent this past Thursday, a counter offer that appears to have played a major role in the eventual firing of Dubas.