‘I wanted to be coach of the Leafs’

Money isn’t the reason Babcock finally said ‘yes’

The question was still in the preamble phase when Brendan Shanahan was shaking his head at it.

No, the president of the Toronto Maple Leafs said, there was no sudden move, no big change in the last 48 hours that brought Mike Babcock into the fold. The Leafs didn’t goose their contract offer with more money or more term, or an extra truck of the former Detroit coach’s preferred Ford model. They didn’t get Mike Myers or Will Arnett to place a celebrity Leafs fan recruiting call, or have The Tragically Hip sing him a song.

“He just came around,” Shanahan said at the Air Canada Centre.

When it was Babcock’s turn to speak, after a splashy news conference at his new place of work, the world’s highestpaid hockey coach, ever, tried to explain the thinking behind his decision. It was a bit fuzzy, owed at least in part to the whirlwind of the last few days. He had been in varying degrees of talks with Toronto, Detroit and Buffalo, and was intrigued by all. There was a trip to Prague in there somewhere, and more talks. He went to bed late one night, he was pretty sure it was Tuesday — his daughter was using a printer, and it kept him up — and thought he had finally made up his mind, and then he woke up in the morning and found he had changed it.

The other offers were attractive, Babcock said: “But they weren’t the Maple Leafs, and they weren’t in this city.”

So for all the talk of the money, of which there is a lot, and the challenge ahead in Toronto, which is formidable, and relatives merits of this roster versus that management group, the deciding factor was something that Babcock, 52, mentioned almost as an aside: “I wanted to be coach of the Maple Leafs.”

And so he is. He comes to Toronto as the 30th coach of the Maple Leafs, the last 21 of whom failed in their attempts to win a Stanley Cup. To his credit, Babcock avoided making bold proclamations, or vowing to bring championships, but instead talked about the process of building a perpetual Cup contender. Mercy, did he and Shanahan ever talk about the process; no one has ever made something so boring sound so utterly desirable. “I never came here to make the playoffs,” Babcock said, “I came here for the Cup process.”

“We’re not speeding up the process,” Shanahan said, “we’re sticking to the process.”

What any of that means is not at all evident. If you wanted to make the case that Team Leafs — Shanahan, Babcock, assistant GM Kyle Dubas and player personnel boss Mark Hunter, plus whomever else is brought in — intends to carpet-bomb the present roster, there was Babcock’s comment that the team needed to get Hunter more draft picks so he could find more young talent. Babcock also talked about the long time it would take to build properly, and that no quick fix is on the horizon. “If you think there is no pain coming, there is pain coming,” he said, his natural perma-wince adding just the right visual for the comment. But Babcock also talked up, at least a little, some of the veterans of the Leafs roster who came under such criticism last season and who would be the most likely candidates to net a haul of draft picks in a possible trade. Of players like Dion Phaneuf and Phil Kessel, Babcock said his job was “to make people around you better.” He said he believed in developing leadership, and that he wanted to get to know those guys, and he mentioned the need for a “safe” environment for players, which sounded like a Shelter for the Victims of the Toronto Media, but was instead his way of saying that a good team that plays solid hockey is a safe environment for everyone. Winning teams tend not to have doubters forever questioning their highest-paid players, in other words.

So the process will be long, and it will seek out draft picks, but maybe not trade veterans if Babcock finds he likes what he sees in them. The process is rather fluid. And that’s the key conclusion that can be drawn from the year-long Brendan Shanahan era in Toronto: he really doesn’t have a plan, at least not one that is carefully mapped out and does not allow deviations.

Shanahan has gone after people he wanted to hire on his own timetable, and without concern for whether the hiring pattern followed the usual tradition. Now he has parts of a front office, inexperienced at the NHL level, but highly regarded, and a head coach with impeccable NHL credentials. He still has no general manager, but says he would like to get one, although even there he sounded kind of indifferent about it. The next GM might already be on staff — the only person it will not be is Babcock, Shanahan said — or it might be someone who is brought in before next month’s amateur draft. But more likely after that. If at all. “If we find the right guy,” Shanahan said, “we’ll move on the right guy.”

It is, as has been noted before, an unusual way to build a hockey organization, where the president doesn’t seem to know what his next move will be until he finds out what move he just made. Mere days ago, with the Babcock pursuit on hold to the point where some very connected hockey people believed it to be entirely dead, Shanahan was interviewing former Tampa Bay coach Guy Boucher, a development guy who would have been a natural fit with a younger, prospect-heavy roster.

And then Mike Babcock woke up on Wednesday morning and decided he wanted to coach the Toronto Maple Leafs. The rest of it, they will figure out from here.