‘Drastic changes’ pay off with players buying in
It has become a regular occurrence in Leafland. Nazem Kadri comes to work on a typical morning and he’s called into the head coach’s office for a one-on-one-meeting.
Considering the head coach’s name is Mike Babcock, and considering Babcock arrived in Toronto with a reputation as a detail-obsessed go-getter whose perfectionism can wear on players, maybe it’s not unreasonable to wonder if those near-daily meetings bode well for a still-developing relationship between a new coach and a player Babcock has called Toronto’s best forward.
But when Kadri was asked on Wednesday to elaborate on the nature of his in-office interactions with Babcock, he spoke with a palpable enthusiasm.
“He is a hard-ass,” Kadri acknowledged of Babcock, smiling.
He paused a beat, searching for find the right words. “It’s a good thing, though.” It was interesting to hear how Kadri and other Leafs were framing their new reality on Wednesday, when they were asked to assess how much things have changed in the centre of the hockey universe 19 games into the Babcock era. It was a year ago this week that we began to truly understand the extent of the dressing room dysfunction in pre-Babcock Leafland — this when nobody on the roster had the leaderly savvy to halt the club’s now-infamous choice not to offer their customary post-victory stick salute to fans in the wake of a home win. Looking back now, it’s remembered as just one head-shaking moment in a season filled with them.
Looking back now, Kadri said the miserable campaign made it “hard to be an athlete.”
“I guess we just didn’t really believe in ourselves,” said Kadri. “Now it’s just a different environment. With the culture change and everything, I think we’ve handled ourselves a little better.”
With Babcock running the day-today program, with Lou Lamoriello as GM, the NHL’s punchline of a heritage franchise suddenly isn’t making a mockery of itself. And even if it’s also not anyone’s idea of a Stanley Cup contender, by playing a hard-working, respectable style the Leafs have taken the soap out of last year’s soap opera and cleaned up respectably.
“That’s what we want,” Morgan Rielly, the team’s top talent, said on Wednesday. “We don’t want to have the distractions or anything. We don’t want to have anybody trying to be bigger than the team. We’re all buying into this team first. . . . We made some changes and we’re really enjoying it and really embracing it.”
With goaltender James Reimer riding the hottest stretch of his career, with the wins suddenly coming in quantity, it’s easy to enjoy it lately. Babcock pointed out unprompted that his team began the day just three points out of a playoff spot.
“We would like to be in the playoff spot,” the coach said.
Considering the Leafs have points in seven of nine games in November, considering they managed just one win in October, the improvement curve suggests it’s not a ridiculous proposition, especially if Reimer can even come close to replicating his recently stellar work in the weeks to come.
“I’ve seen drastic changes,” Babcock said. “Now they understand what I’m talking about. For the longest time, they didn’t. It takes some time to figure it out.”
It was 10-some months ago, of course, that Randy Carlyle was fired as head coach with the Leafs clinging to a playoff spot. So why, with the Leafs on the fringe of the postseason picture and most of the same roster in place, has morale rebounded? Kadri, at least, has his take. And it includes the change in tone in the meetings in the head coach’s office.
“Usually if I was in (Carlyle’s) office, it wasn’t anything too pleas- ant,” Kadri said. “Usually when you were getting one of these” — and here Kadri mimicked Carlyle delivering a get-your-butt-over-here finger prod — “you knew you weren’t going to talk about dinner plans.”
Not that Babcock is anyone’s idea of Mr. Pleasantry. He is, as Kadri said, a committed hard-ass.
“With Babs, it’s a little bit of everything. There’s a lot of teaching. But at the same time, when you deserve a pat on the back, he’s going to give it to you,” Kadri said.
Sure enough, on Wednesday Babcock used a portion of his media briefing to applaud Kadri, who hasn’t scored in more than a month, on the defensive work he’d done in Tuesday’s 5-1 win over the Avalanche.
Said Kadri, speaking before Babcock made those comments: “It’s nice to have someone in your corner, just always trying to put you in the right direction and believing in you. And even if you make a mistake . . . he’s going to give you a chance at redemption and he’s not going to bury you or throw you under the bus. He’s going to give you an opportunity to fix it.”
With Toronto’s roster still anchored by many of the players from last season’s embarrassing debacle, Kadri isn’t the only one who’s been given an opportunity to fix something. There are those who’ll call these early days of Babcock’s tenure a honeymoon, and rightly so; there will always be plenty of doubters in the ultimate upside of this collection of Maple Leafs. But the difference this season, at least the way Kadri was speaking, is that the doubters aren’t populating the coach’s office and the dressing room.
The biggest difference, said Kadri: “It’s just belief.”
That’d be Babcock’s belief in the team, and the team’s belief in itself, and Kadri’s belief that the coach actually believes in him, and so on. A year removed from a moment that saw the Maple Leafs raise a metaphorical middle finger to their fans, their fans are beginning to be shown the outlines of a team they might one day believe in, too.