Nowhere to go but up for Toronto, Edmonton
EDMONTON— Mike Babcock is a Saskatchewan man, but he began his coaching career here in Alberta, at Red Deer College back in 1988.
The Maple Leafs coach was reminded of this on Wednesday when, in the leadup to Thursday’s game against the Oilers, a reporter asked him for his recollections of Red Deer Arena. They’re tearing down the 65-year-old barn to make way for something newer and nicer, apparently. And Babcock was asked what he remembered about the place.
“Well, winning,” Babcock said. “We won every night.”
That’s the eventual goal in Toronto. And on the day after the franchise continued a roster demolition by trading captain Dion Phaneuf and his $7-million (U.S.) cap hit, Babcock updated the fanbase on the ETA to excellence.
“I don’t know how long it’s going to take,” Babcock said for the umpteenth time since arriving last spring.
Nobody knows, because team building is an inexact business. But if Leaf fans want a glimpse of a cautionary tale about the painful possibilities, Rexall Place is a decent vantage point. The Oilers have been gifted the first-overall pick four times in the past six drafts, a streak of good fortune that, in some minds, should have quickly led to elite-team status. And yet when the puck drops Thursday both the Oilers and the Maple Leafs will possess 47 points apiece — the lowest total in the league. Auston Matthews, who’d you rather?
Wednesday’s coaching matchup will pit Babcock against Todd McLellan, one of Babcock’s former assistants in Detroit. Both men are slogging through their respective debut seasons.
And it can’t thrill either that their presence hasn’t led to hard and fast progress in the win column.
“We didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about (the standings). We’re big boys. We signed on, right? No one tricked us. We knew what we were getting in for,” Babcock said. “We know how hard the league is. I never promised anybody anything was going to happen overnight.”
Some things in the hockey world do happen in a blink. And such was the case with Tuesday’s Phaneuf trade. Two of the pieces the Leafs acquired in the deal — Jared Cowen and Colin Greening — practised with the team on Wednesday. And though both could easily be seen as spare parts tossed aside by the Senators — Cowen has often been a healthy scratch and Greening has been playing in the AHL — Babcock promised they’d get a shot.
“We need help,” Babcock said. “So they’re going to get an opportunity.”
The six-foot-five Cowen, who had requested a trade out of Ottawa, has been criticized for his poor decisionmaking and lack of footspeed. But on Wednesday, he said his troubles date back to the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season, when he suffered a hip injury that later led to an abdominal injury, both of which have lingered for years. He had surgery to repair the abdominal issue last summer. And though the hip still bothers him, he said he’ll be ready to play if he’s called upon.
“It’s been an endless domino of injuries,” said Cowen, 25. “I’m trying to put that behind me.” Greening, 29, didn’t sugarcoat his career recent downturn. He said he fell from grace with Ottawa’s big club because “there were guys who outplayed me.” But Babcock spoke of Greening’s speed as a possible asset in Leafland.
“We need pace, and he has pace,” the coach said.
So Cowen and Greening will get their test drives as the Maple Leafs continue their long and winding journey to a better place. As heroic a job as the management team has done in shedding the albatross contracts of Phaneuf and David Clarkson and Phil Kessel (minus $1.2 million in retained salary in the latter case), laying waste to the abandoned plan is the easy part. Laying the foundation for the new blueprint is the trickier art.
“If it was easy and it was fair, everyone would win the Cup once every 30 years,” Babcock said. “But the great thing about the good franchises is they don’t think like that. They want to win it every year. So if you manage it right and you draft right and you develop it right, you can be good for a long time. So that’s what we’re in the process of now.”
Who’ll be integral to the process in the years to come? On Wednesday, Nazem Kadri was asked whether he sees himself as a Maple Leaf in the long term. Kadri, whose throatslashing gesture toward Mark Giordano in Tuesday’s 4-3 loss in Calgary was said to be under review by the league, received a talking to from Babcock about the incident.
But Babcock also spent part of Wednesday continuing his seasonlong heaping of public praise on Kadri, calling the centreman “better than I could have ever thought.”
Said Kadri, a restricted free agent at season’s end: “Hopefully I’m part of the (Leafs’) future. I get pretty good vibes . . . I don’t know it all, by all means. I’ve got a lot to learn. But I think with their guidance I can definitely become an impact player.”
That at age 25 his future with the club remains an open question only underlines how capricious the business of team-building can be. Winning the draft lottery may be a fanbase’s dream. Winning every night is certainly Babcock’s goal. But this is as good a place as any to see that one is hardly a straight shot to the other.
“It’s just so hard for players to know what they’re going to become, what their potential is. At the end of the day, (drafting a player is) taking a chance,” Kadri said. “That’s why they call it a lottery draft pick. You don’t know if things are going to pan out or not.”