Why Former Maple Leafs Director of Scouting Boss Wes Clark Departed the Club to Take on a VP Role With the Penguins…
Wes Clark is no longer running point on amateur scoring for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Pittsburgh Penguins announced on Tuesday that they hired Clark to become their vice president of player personnel.
Clark served as the Leafs’ director of amateur scouting and had been responsible for picks at the NHL Draft for the last few years. He has been credited for some of his selections that may have been seen as a reach by some other draft prognosticators. The most recent example saw Clark select Easton Cowan with the 28th overall pick in the 2023 Draft, only to see the player excel the following year with a standout season with the London Knights.
But Clark is following Dubas, who departed the Leafs organization last year to become the president and GM of the Penguins last summer.
“Having worked with Wes for many years, I have a deep trust in his ability to identify talent, lead staffs, advance our scouting process and methods, learn from mistakes to improve processes and to challenge my own thinking and planning on a near daily basis,” Dubas said in a statement about Clark’s hiring.
Both go way back to their time with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds when Dubas served as GM of the OHL club and Clark was the director of player personnel.
When Dubas joined the Leafs organization as an assistant GM in 2014, Clark joined the Leafs later that year as an amateur scout.
In 2016, Clark briefly departed the Leafs to join the Florida Panthers as a scout until Dubas was elevated to the Leafs GM position and hired Clark back as an assistant director of player personnel before being elevated to the director of scouting spot during the 2021-22 season.
When Dubas departed the organization, it didn’t take long before some other staff in Toronto followed suit. Jason Spezza wasted no time in tendering his resignation when the Leafs elected not to renew Dubas as GM and joined him in Pittsburgh as an assistant general manager. Jon Elkin, who had been the Leafs head goaltending evaluator, bolted for Pittsburgh in a similar role.
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