The Maple Leafs will likely decide the fate of head coach Randy Carlyle this week.
Time to decide. And the Maple Leafs will indeed decide the future of Randy Carlyle this week, at least whether he’ll be back as head coach of the club next season. New president Brendan Shanahan has had the knee surgery he’d put off for a while, general manager Dave Nonis has been to Finland and back to view the world’s best teenage prospects in the IIHF world under-18 tournament, and this week all the key thinkers in the organization will convene in Las Vegas for it’s annual amateur scouting meetings. Figuring out which player may fall into Toronto’s lap with the eighth overall pick next month in Philadelphia at the draft is, obviously, the main reason for the get-together. But the future of Carlyle has been floating out there for a while now, obscured to some degree by the frenzy that engulfed the Raptors until Sunday afternoon and by the thrills and spills of the Stanley Cup playoffs to date. In theory, there’s no immediate need to make a call on the coach because there aren’t games next week or next month. Vancouver doesn’t have a coach. Neither do the Nashville Predators nor the Florida Panthers. Carolina just put a new boss in place, Ron Francis, and head coach Kirk Muller is waiting to have his future determined. San Jose’s ignominious collision with fate is complete, and while GM Doug Wilson says he thinks head coach Todd McLellan should return, ownership might have different thoughts. So sure, Shanahan and Nonis and Co. could still put this decision on Carlyle off for a while yet. But that hardly seems reasonable, nor does it seem smart. Good organizations, successful ones, don’t operate that way. So the tall foreheads in the Leaf front office have had a chance to take a deep breath and collect their thoughts after a nightmarish end to the regular season. Nonis has sat down with Carlyle and discussed the reasons behind the March/April swoon, and it’s up to the GM to make a call on whether the future looks promising with this coach. The guess here is Nonis isn’t inclined to fire Carlyle. He certainly wasn’t in mid-March, but the results in the final weeks changed a lot of thinking around the Leaf organiza- tion, and Nonis was and is obliged to take a much more analytical look at the entire team and coaching staff.
The variable here, needless to say, is the new relationship being forged between Nonis and Shanahan, who still is likely forming in his own mind how he wants this organization to function.
There are teams, like New Jersey, where one person (Lou Lamoriello) is in charge, and then there are teams like Columbus where John Davidson is the team president but clearly is intimately involved with the decision-making surrounding the hockey club.
Most believe Kevin Lowe has a big say on what happens in Edmonton, although he’s not the president. Joe Sakic, Patrick Roy and Greg Sherman all have front office responsibilities in Denver. How it’s going to work in Calgary with Brian Burke and new GM Brad Treliving, meanwhile, will be interesting to watch.
Shanahan seems unlikely just to sit back passively and let Nonis go about his business like nothing has changed. At the same time, unlike Mike Gillis in Vancouver, Nonis is still working under a newly appointed marquee name, and without any reduction in his authority.
So it will take time to sort out how the Shanahan-Nonis relationship will work, and the first piece of hard evidence will be the Carlyle decision, not only what decision is made but the way in which it is communicated to the public.
Clearly, there are oodles of interested folks who believe Carlyle must go, that it is simply beyond his abilities to improve this team. That, given Carlyle’s very good overall resume, seems harsh, and it’s worth noting that six of the eight coaches currently still alive in the Stanley Cup playoffs were fired at least once.
Michel Therrien seemed almost un-hirable two years ago. Claude Julien was canned by New Jersey seven years ago with three games left in the regular season while owning the second-best record in the Eastern Conference. Heck, the Canucks just last spring decided John Tortorella was an upgrade on Alain Vigneault. Darryl Sutter was all but run out of Calgary.
So today’s moron is often tomorrow’s genius.
We know Carlyle is an experienced successful coach with an enviable career record; the question is whether he’s the right coach for the Leafs, or whether at this point in his career he can do the job effectively in an always changing league. There were certainly times this season when Carlyle seemed unable to get his team to play a certain way, and that’s never a good sign.
Carlyle undoubtedly had his take on the final weeks of the season, and now it’s about whether Nonis bought what his coach is selling, and whether Shanahan feels strongly one way or another.
The shock of another ruined season should be over.
Now, it’s time to starting moving forward again with a decision that doesn’t have to be made now, but should be.