BABCOCK’S WAY

Taskmaster coach very clearly sets new agenda for troops

Those who don’t buy into Mike Babcock’s way of thinking, including his expectation that the Leafs can win, shouldn’t expect to last.

It was the opening morning of training camp when the 39th coach in Maple Leafs franchise history began to lay out the plan for the club’s 99th season. A reporter prefaced a question with what sounded like a deferential comment. “Mike,” the reporter said, “you were a winner . . . ” It only took a second for Mike Babcock, the new-to-Toronto coaching lifer with the two Olympic gold medals and the Stanley Cup ring, to interrupt his questioner with a quibble.

“That sounded past tense,” Babcock said. “Let’s say that again.”

And sure enough the reporter politely abided with a quick re-phrasing of his premise.

“You’re a winner,” was how the new version went. And everybody laughed.

But you’ll forgive the scribe for his original wording. It wasn’t long after Babcock arrived in Toronto back in May, to great fanfare and with an industry-shaking $50-million pay package, that the coach quickly began to frame Bay Street as the NHL equivalent of skid row.

“There’s pain coming,” is how Babcock foresaw Toronto’s competitive prospects.

But a few months on, and less than three weeks from the Oct. 7 regular-season opener, Babcock’s expectation-lowering sales pitch doesn’t appear to have convinced the wider NHL community of his team’s impending ineptness.

As Ken Hitchcock, the St. Louis Blues coach, was saying on TSN Radio 1050 the other day, speaking of Babcock: “I think he’s set you guys all up.

“Because I think . . . his team is going to do a lot better than people think.”

It’s an opinion that’s been echoing around the hockey world for most of the summer.

“They’ll make the playoffs,” Tiger Williams, the former Leafs tough guy and a longtime admirer of Babcock’s work, said the other day.

Maybe a playoff berth sounds like a stretch when you consider how much the rest of the Eastern Conference field has improved, and when you remember that the team Babcock inherited won nine of its final 41games last season, this after Randy Carlyle was fired and Peter Horachek presided over three-plus months of disgraceful indifference. Surely the suspicious number of familiar faces remaining from that squad — Salute-gate-enabling captain Dion Phaneuf among them — doesn’t scream post-season optimism.

But this year’s Leafs are mostly the same Leafs, don’t forget, that found themselves a point into the playoff picture on that January day Carlyle was fired; the same Leafs team that didn’t beget an off-season fire sale; the same Leafs team that, judging by the acquisition of credible veterans including Daniel Winnik and Brad Boyes and P.A. Parenteau, clearly aren’t intent on tanking for Auston Matthews, the likely No. 1-overall pick in the 2016 draft.

And if you buy the theory that Toronto’s hockeyists have achieved addition by subtraction by gifting their chief bad influence to Pittsburgh, then it’s not a stretch to imagine the Leafs if not in the playoffs, then at least in the race.

It all depends on how much you believe in Babcock and the power of his eight-year deal. The coach is renowned as a taskmaster both tireless and exacting who’s been adept at pushing not-so-star-studded rosters to respectable heights.

As Scotty Bowman, the Hall of Fame coach, was saying of Babcock earlier this year: “It’s not like he’s always had super players.”

Babcock does, mind you, have a super contract and the eight-year pact — which will pay him an annual average salary of $6.25 million that beats everyone on the team but Phaneuf — is the hammer that can nail to the bench any player who doesn’t buy into the program.

So the team is largely the same, yes. But difference is that, a year after Carlyle began training camp by acknowledging a double standard in Leafland, admitting openly that the talented likes of Phil Kessel weren’t expected to lower themselves to everyman tasks, Babcock arrived on Thursday with a one-size-fits-everyone dictum. In Babcock’s Leafland everyone has a “clean slate,” no matter their dirty recent history, and everyone “will work,” starting with the coach. And anyone who doesn’t comply — well, since no one’s going to outlast Babcock, even the dumbest among the group will understand there’s a great seat in the press box, or a plane out of town, for the uncommitted.

Unless you’re a Leaf fan dreaming of the draft lottery, it was all exactly what you wanted to hear.

Babcock’s message was often optimistic, as when he discussed highceilinged defencemen Morgan Rielly and Jake Gardiner.

“They’ve got to get way better defensively,” he said. “But everyone knows (Rielly) has elite upside as an offensive player. And Gardiner, when I watch him, I think he should be a good player. So let’s build ’em up. Let’s get ’em playing. Let’s get ’em to understand that the faster you play defence, and the more you have the puck, the less time you’ve got to spend in the defensive zone.”

Babcock’s message was decisive, as when he assessed the goaltending tandem of Jonathan Bernier and James Reimer.

“I like one guy to know he’s the (No. 1) guy,” Babcock said. “Someone’s gotta grab it.”

Babcock’s message was at times very specific. Said the coach, speaking of a theoretical back check: “Our forwards are coming back hard.”

You’ll notice that sentence was phrased in the present tense — as though he was envisioning legs churning when training camp commences Friday in Halifax. There are those who believe the coach will get what the coach demands.

“He could take a bunch of bull frogs and make ’em a good team,” was the way Tiger Williams was putting it recently. “He’s the Wayne Gretzky of coaching in today’s environment. He’s organized. He’s thorough. He works hard. It’ll be good.”

Said Bowman a while back: “He had a helluva year with Detroit this (past) year. Detroit didn’t have the scoring. But Babcock designed a pretty good system.”

Indeed, the Red Wings had the second-best power play in the league in 2014-15 (a coaching triumph Babcock heaped upon Jim Hiller, one of the assistant coaches who followed him to Toronto). And when the Tampa Bay Lightning arrived at the Stanley Cup final, more than a few of them cited Babcock’s Red Wings, whom the Lightning needed seven games to elim- inate, as their toughest opponent en route.

This is Toronto, of course, not Detroit. But the Leafs brought Babcock here figuring some of that Red Wing magic resides within the bench boss.

“The two things that irritate me the most are lack of preparation and lack of compete,” Babcock said Thursday. “That’s not happening. So we’re going to get that fixed. If it takes longer than we want, it takes longer than we want. If it’s quicker than we expected, it’s quicker.”

Maybe it’s silly to believe that the team that finished fourth-last in the league can engineer a Blue Jaysspeed turnaround that lands them in a playoff race. Leafs management has been buying time with talk of a draft-and-develop model. In some ways it’s counter-productive to talk about achieving before you’ve acquired the requisite pieces.

But on the opening morning of training camp, when that reporter prefaced that question in the past tense, don’t think it was by accident Babcock demanded an in-the-moment correction. Everyone laughed, it’s true, and the coach smiled, too.

But then Babcock offered a clarification for context. “I wasn’t trying to be funny.” In other words, he sees himself as a winner, now and next week and forever. We’ll soon be saying goodbye to the players who don’t see themselves the same way.