THE LEAFS' $ 50M MAN
Maple Leafs put rebuild on fast track with hiring of new coach,
Brendan Shanahan is apparently not working from the Oxford definition of the word “patience.” It was only five weeks ago that Shanahan, having finally cashiered Dave Nonis from the Toronto Maple Leafs front office, along with most of the coaching and scouting staffs, stood in the Air Canada Centre and led with his battle-scarred chin.
He said that the rebuild of the Leafs would take time. A lot of time, even. Shortcuts had always gotten the hockey team into trouble before, he said. Patience would be required, and in a market as hockey-mad as Toronto, the organization would need someone in charge who had the stomach to stick out the years of careful, but wholesale, change.
“I have that stomach,” Shanahan said that day. He had the patience.
And then he played the one and only advantage he had — money — and lured the biggest name on the coaching market, Mike Babcock, to leave the Detroit Red Wings and become the latest would-be saviour of a franchise that has not won a Stanley Cup in almost 50 years and has made the playoffs once since 2004.
The remarkable term of Babcock’s contract — a reported eight years at US$50 million total — suggests that Shanahan has not totally given up on the idea of patience, but the presence of a guy behind the bench who made the playoffs for 10 straight years in Detroit, with a Stanley Cup and two Olympic gold medals to his credit, also puts a limit on it.
After his post-Nonis press conference in April, there was a widely held view that Shanahan was looking at a path to contention that was closer to five-plus years than two years. The total house-cleaning, the hiring of a young assistant GM in Kyle Dubas and a player personnel director in Mark Hunter, all the talk of the need to avoid shortcuts: These were moves for the long term, the kind of things that were necessary first steps in a long process. Had the next steps been to hire a general manager out of the ranks of capable NHL assistant GMs and a coach who had performed well in, say, the college or minor-league ranks, Shanahan would have continued the pattern of the brick-by-brick assembly of a competitive organization.
The Babcock hiring is a different signal altogether. The turntable just screeched to a halt when the dusty cowboy walked into the saloon. When the new coach and his boss speak on Thursday at the ACC, they will almost certainly say they are still committed to a careful build. There’s no sense getting anyone worked up with parade talk (again). But you simply do not pay a head coach many millions of dollars to oversee several years’ worth of a bottom-five team that happily acquires top draft picks and aims to be competitive in 2020. This deal makes no sense unless Babcock and Shanahan look at the Toronto Maple Leafs roster and see either the elements for contention already in place, or the potential to turn those assets into a competitive team in the next couple of years. Ted Nolan just spent two seasons trying to coach a Buffalo Sabres team that was getting its head caved in every night amid a patient rebuild. Are we really to believe that Babcock has signed up for the Toronto version of that?
As to whether Babcock really will shorten the path to relevance, the simple answer is: maybe. He is a very good hockey coach, with all of the obvious evidence provided by his resumé, but perhaps no fact more telling than that Detroit has avoided the swoon that seemed inevitable with a roster that was both getting old and depleted by the retirement of some of its warhorses. The Maple Leafs needed the fluke of a strike-shortened season just to make the playoffs; the Red Wings, under Babcock, couldn’t miss them.
But Toronto fans should be long past the point where they believe that past success elsewhere is any kind of predictor of success here. Pat Burns, Pat Quinn, Ron Wilson and Paul Maurice had coached NHL teams to the Stanley Cup final before arriving in Toronto, none could do it here. Brian Burke had shepherded a Cupwinning team in Anaheim before he came to Toronto to try to end the drought; even his addition of a Cup-winning coach in Randy Carlyle was just the precursor to more failure and consternation.
We tend to get so wrapped up in what a coach has or hasn’t done that we give it far more value than it deserves. Before this playoff season started, Bruce Boudreau had never taken a team past the second round. The Ducks, and Boudreau, are now in the third round. Did Boudreau suddenly become a better coach, or did he need the right roster, and some breaks, to finally make a conference final?
Success, in the NHL, requires a good coach, and a lot of other elements. The Maple Leafs have a good coach now, a few promising assets, and a whole lot of recently devalued ones. It looks a long way from adding up to something meaningful.
But it’s a splash, and a start, and for a guy who on April 13 was talking about the need to gut out the lean years, Shanahan seems like a guy who wasn’t wild about his own advice.