Carlyle’s ‘here today’ — but what about next year?
Head coach will likely pay price as club seeks new ‘direction’ following latest disappointment
When Randy Carlyle stepped to the lectern on Tuesday, you would have excused him if he did a double take for imminent danger.
It was only a day earlier, after all, that his ultimate boss, MLSE CEO Tim Leiweke, had spoken with an angry edge about the embarrassing state of Toronto’s latest playoff-missing debacle.
“The talent (GM) David Nonis assembled, this team should have achieved better,” Leiweke said.
But if that was an obvious shot in Carlyle’s direction, on Tuesday there was no axe falling imminently from the ceiling and no trap door underfoot. The head coach still had an office and a parking space and a working pass card at the Air Canada Centre — none of which set aside the obvious assumption that his Bay St. fate was still dangling in the shifting winds of franchise change. “I’m here today,” Carlyle said. It’s hard to imagine he won’t be gone one day soon enough. When Carlyle was hired more than two years ago, this in the wake of another Leafs season rendered dead, the one-time Stanley Cupwinning bench boss was immediately suspected as a bad match for Toronto’s collection of offence-is-all talent.
In the two-plus seasons since, Carlyle has done little to dispel that first impression. Given that he has committed more than his share of hard-to-pardon sins while he’s been in town — he couldn’t pull the Leafs out of a death spiral that saw them lose 12 of their final 14 games this season just like he couldn’t be bothered to call a timeout during last spring’s Game 7 meltdown — well, let’s just say his presence is tenuous.
If Leaf fans were expecting a more expeditious bloodletting, consider that Tuesday was only Day 2 of Brendan Shanahan’s presidential administration. If you listened to Shanahan at his inauguration, when he said all the right things about duly studying the operation in an effort to avoid knee-jerk decisions, you’d understand he couldn’t exactly spend Tuesday firing a coach with whom he shares only a say-hello relationship.
But Leiweke did plenty on Monday to alert his underlings to his disgust with the hockey operation, and Shanahan knows for whom he’s working now. The
“The talent (GM) David Nonis assembled, this team should have achieved better.” TIM LEIWEKE MLSE CEO
CEO said he doesn’t like the club’s “direction,” just as he abhors its current “culture.”
Is it possible that the two men most responsible for charting that direction and establishing that culture, Carlyle and Nonis, will both be working for the organization next season? In Leiweke’s corporate jungle, wherein there’s little tolerance for anything but spin-able progress, it’s highly improbable.
That’s not to say there aren’t credible dissenting views. Jonathan Bernier, the team’s star goaltender, said Monday the problem this season wasn’t with the coach or his system, but with a group of players who refused to “buy in” to the hard rigours of defensive hockey. Still, what Shanahan will find when he does his due diligence is this: While there’s a case to be made Carlyle is not the problem here, there’s also very little evidence he’s amounted to any kind of a solution.
Though the Leafs got better goaltend- ing this season than a year ago, when they made their first run to the postseason since 2004, they got much worse defensively. They became less hard to play against. Emboldened by a 10-4 October, they seemed to get more selfsatisfied with their cavalier approach.
That sashaying sense of entitlement is endemic to these parts, and this team seemed to enjoy its god-like status and guaranteed-salary good life more than most. Whether there’s a coach on this planet with the ability to cure blue and white disease without a massive personnel overhaul is a fine question. The truth is Carlyle had his shot — 148 regularseason games’ worth — and after last year’s blip has presided over regression.
“A lot of the good we did last year, in terms of how we played and how committed we are, seemed to disappear at times this year,” Nonis said on Monday.
Let’s be frank: Carlyle’s Leafs were often dominated this season. Their shot differential, minus-8 a game, was second-worst in the league to the Sabres. It’s a significant stat that needs to be improved. In the past 20 years, only one Stanley Cup champion had a negative regular-season shot differential (the Pittsburgh Penguins). Only two champions finished out of the top 10 in the stat.
Carlyle’s teams, to that end, have been on an alarmingly downward trajectory when it comes to allowing their goaltenders to be pelted with merciless quantities of rubber. While Carlyle won a Stanley Cup in 2007 with a star-studded defensive corps that included Chris Pronger and Scott Niedermayer — and while those Ducks had the third-best shot differential in the league at plus-4.1 a game — the clubs he has coached have been outshot in every season since, this according to numbers provided by Randy Robles of the Elias Sports Bureau. The problem has gotten progressively worse. And if that’s got a lot to do with Toronto’s inadequate defensive core, it doesn’t say much about the coach.
“We’ve talked about being a puck possession team and less of a rush team,” Carlyle said. “We just didn’t do it consistently.”
Carlyle, asked if he would have done anything differently this season, essentially said what John Tortorella said in Vancouver earlier this week: If he has a reputation for being hard on players, he would have been harder.
Uncharacteristically, Carlyle made a thinly veiled jab at Jake Gardiner — identifying him as a “young defenceman” who favoured “rover-type of hockey” earlier in the season. Carlyle spoke of differing realities; of how Gardiner had perceived his leash too short when the coaching staff considered it too long; of how Gardiner had an outsized opinion of his skill set; of how, if the coach had to do it over, he would have laid down the law from the get-go and demanded a less risky style of play. It was frank talk that suggested he suspects either he or Gardiner won’t be around next season to address the conflict.
“We’re not asking players to do something they haven’t done before,” Carlyle said. “You have to play and you have to compete on the defensive side of the puck with will and commitment. And we didn’t want to do that on a regular basis.”
Again, Carlyle was speaking of regret, not results. Maybe the ideal replacement candidate hasn’t yet emerged on Shanahan’s radar. But when he does, it’ll only make sense to unleash the axe and give a new voice a chance to deliver the message, even if it’s possible the new message, like Carlyle’s, will only be left to reverberate in several possibly hollow heads.