Carlyle made scapegoat for Leafs’ miseries
Coach doesn’t deserve to be on hot seat after only one full season leading team
TORONTO — It sure looks as though Randy Carlyle is going to be made the fall guy for the Maple Leafs’ collapse.
He is, after all, the one driving the bus. He’s the head coach who could not teach the players to possess the puck or play defence, who won games earlier in the season because of a red-hot sniper and even hotter goaltenders.
He is the coach Mikhail Grabovski once called a “(expletive) idiot,” and who everyone in the analytics world apparently loves to hate.
He is also the fourth head coach this team has had in the last eight years. Firing him might appease some fans who need someone to blame, but the last thing this franchise needs is another coach.
Successful teams are built on continuity. They don’t blow up the roster after every season in which they fail to win the Stanley Cup or miss the playoffs. They build. They grow.
Mike Babcock has been coaching in Detroit since 2005, while San Jose’s Todd McLellan and Chicago’s Joel Quenneville have been in their positions since the 200809 season. Barry Trotz has been the only coach in Nashville’s 15 years in the NHL.
In Toronto, coaches are spat out with regularity. Pat Quinn lasted seven years and was fired in 2006 after missing the playoffs for the first time. His replacement, Paul Maurice, was gone by 2008. Ron Wilson almost made it through four seasons, but was canned two months after signing a contract extension.
Carlyle, who is in his first full season in Toronto, has not yet coached 150 Leafs games.
He is the first coach since Quinn to lead the team to a playoff spot and, up until the recently ended eight-gamelo-sing streak, they were pointed toward home-ice advantage in the first round. Now, he is reportedly standing in the way of their success.
Carlyle has his faults. His stubbornness in dressing Colton Orr and using a short bench might be the reason why the team ran out of gas in the final month of the season. And, as others have pointed out, the possession numbers of Carlyle-coached teams have steadily decreased during the last several seasons.
But Carlyle also has moved elements of this team forward.
He helped Phil Kessel evolve into a three-zone player and developed James van Riemsdyk into the kind of power forward that no one in the Flyers organization thought he could be.
He has turned defenceman Cody Franson, who is second in hits, into more of a physical presence and has lately allowed young defencemen Jake Gardiner and Morgan Rielly to make mistakes in service of their on-ice maturity.
He is not a bad coach. Bad coaches become broadcasters. They do not win a Stanley Cup or go 11 straight years without being unemployed. Argue all you want with Carlyle’s methodology, but he has not lost this team. If he had, you would have seen blowout losses during this slide.
You would not have seen Kessel repeatedly blocking shots against the Calgary Flames or the team trying to mount unlikely comebacks against the St. Louis Blues and Detroit Red Wings.
Carlyle is the first person to admit the early-season success might have been a mirage (“We were finding ways to win and mask a lot of the deficiencies.”). But he also believes the team’s losing streak was more about “mental breakdowns” than a longawaited correction to bring their record in line with their advanced possession statistics.
“Those are tough things to go through,” he said of the skid. “You look back on it and you try to reflect ... Sometimes you just feel helpless. Sometimes you just go, ‘What could we do?’
“Believe me, there’s lots of things that have gone on inside, whether it’s video or … changing the way you present things because you just cannot stay the same. You cannot bring the same thing, the same message, the same way. We’ve done numerous things over the course of this season and we’ll continue to try to change it to mix it up for our group.”
For general manager Dave Nonis — and by extension, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment president and CEO Tim Leiweke — Carlyle’s performance will surely be evaluated after the season.
The answers become easier if the Leafs miraculously win four or five of their remaining games and sneak into the playoffs. But, with six pending unrestricted free agents, changes are coming.
It remains to be seen whether those changes will include replacing Carlyle with Kevin Dineen, Peter Laviolette or Peter DeBoer, whose contract with the New Jersey Devils expires at the end of the season.
But whoever is coaching the team, the Leafs have to give them more than a twoyear window to turn things around.