Don’t blame Carlyle for Leafs’ collapse — blame belongs with players disconnected from reality

Prediction: Randy Carlyle is not going anywhere.

Caution: The Leafs would be foolish and reckless to fire him.

As tempting and knee-jerk as it is to blame the bench boss for the calamity that befell the Toronto Maple Leafs in the last month of the season — 2-12-0 — the fault lies with a group of players who could not rally from an ever-deepening hockey stupor, failing the test of character and fortitude, time and time again.

Oh, there were flashes of backbone, when least expected — beating Boston in the second last week of the schedule, especially. Yet those spurts of mettle were fleeting and ultimately misleading. This was more the team that lost to Winnipeg and Florida and New Jersey down the dismaying stretch; less the team that rose to the challenge of the Bruins.

And the core problem, I suggest, is that the players still don’t see themselves for what they are. They scratch their heads and wonder, how did this happen? The answer is staring them in the face, if only they looked hard in the mirror.

They misunderstood and over-evaluated their individual talents. They were a difficult team to coach because they never acknowledged the blatant lapses in their game. Right till the end they saw themselves as victims — of fate, of a system they clearly rejected, of breaks that went the opposition’s way, even when that opposition was feeble — rather than as perpetrators of their own ridiculous collapse.

In his closing address to the media Tuesday, Carlyle made an intriguing reference to one of the exit interviews he’d conducted with players the previous day. He did not name the Leaf in question but identified him as a defenseman who believed the “leash he was afforded in the beginning of the season wasn’t as long as the one that was afforded at the end of the season.”

You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to conclude that the individual under oblique discussion was probably Jake Gardiner. “Who he compared himself with in the league — that was kind of shocking.”

Assuming it was Gardiner, who might he have likened himself to, Drew Doughty? Gardiner is a highrisk, high-reward D-man but he’s no Doughty. It was also evident that, in the waning weeks, Carlyle had given up trying to restrain his young rearguard, as Gardiner endlessly pinched to his heart’s desire.

Those gambles invariably turned into odd-man rushes the other way, waves of incoming assaults that Jonathan Bernier pointedly complained about before he was lost to recurring injury and which James Reimer clearly could not handle either.

Not to pick on Gardiner, who has a luscious up-side to his game, but this is what I mean about players who see themselves through a glass dimly, through a prism of self-delusion. Could another coach rectify that? Doubtful. Is not, rather, Carlyle ahead of the game by understanding the personnel and trying to fix the disconnect that obviously exists?

Because, as Carlyle admitted on Tuesday, he made mistakes; misjudgments, too, crucially by not intervening to forcefully correct patterns that emerged early in the season, when the Leafs were getting away with puck coverage deficiencies — all those monstrously outshot games — and before it became the club’s graphic handicap.

“What would I change?” Carlyle asked rhetorically. “I think I’d be hard and fast about some decisions early in the season and be committed to doing them.”

When the coaching staff attempted to alter the equation, around the Olympic break, bad habits were too intensely ingrained and the players heedless. They persisted in doing things their way and that resulted in an eight-game losing streak. They said: Huh? They played: Duh?

“The last 30 days of the season was the tell-taling story of our group from the standpoint that things we were doing in the beginning of the season, and winning, came to fruition . . . (and) we weren’t going to be able to win hockey games if we continued to play that way.”

A team that found a reservoir of commitment during its last road trip out west, winning two of three against formidable clubs in California, took bows, all chuffed with itself, and then shrugged off the warning signs in two subsequent losses to Washington and Detroit as discomposure settled in. “We seemed to have lost our mojo as a team,” said Carlyle. “The two games were quite alarming for the coaching staff and for everybody involved. Something changed. Looking back, that turned the tide of the season. “We went to the breathe-breathe, just-breathe, let’s get through this. And we weren’t able to get it back.” Thus they became a fragile team, shoulders slumping, as Carlyle noted from behind the bench, whenever they gave up an opening goal. “There wasn’t a push-back on the next shift. And that’s really what you ask of your group. When those things are going on, you’re asking them to dig deep. Shifts after goals are most important. Those are the events within the games and our response was very minimal.” Much has been speculated about the alleged lack of leadership in the dressing room. I’m not convinced that’s hugely significant. What the Leafs lacked was leadership on the ice to turn the tide. Did the rapidly unraveling Dion Phaneuf lay a bonecrushing hit on anybody in the second half of the season? Where was the heroic shot-blocking, the sturdy backcheck, the gumption that had made this team hard to play against last year? Carlyle said Tuesday that the Leafs never found an identity this season, as they had in that defining firstround playoff series against the Bruins last spring. But that’s not true. They do have an identity, it’s just not a pleasing one: Soft, sagging under pressure and willfully blind to their shortcomings. From the start, these Leafs thought too highly of themselves. They still do, which is why they’re so disbelieving of surrendering a playoff berth that looked safe as houses only a month ago. In crisis, they were panicky and apathetic. They came undone. That’s the culture that must change — the culture generated by players to whom losing came much too easily in the crunch. Carlyle is a Cup-winning coach who’s only missed the playoffs twice in his career. There aren’t many of that stature out there. He’s not the cause of the disaffect.