Babcock saw possibilities before anyone else did,
Mike Babcock seemed to see the possibilities of this special Leafland spring before most anyone else.
Even back in the long winter of 2016 — in the months after he’d arrived in Toronto forecasting pain and a long process — the Maple Leafs coach was already offering a more optimistic viewpoint than he’d put forth during his grand entrance.
“I’ve got this year and seven more here,” he said in February of 2016, specifying the term of his $50million contract. “And then I’m going to stay for two more (years) because the team’s going to be that good.”
Fast forward seven months, on the night Babcock coached Canada to gold at the World Cup of Hockey, and he was even more bullish: “This is just a sign of what’s going to happen here in Toronto, just so you know.”
And seven months further on, in the lead-up to Sunday’s Game 6 of a beyond-tight first-round playoff series with the Capitals, Babcock was all but guaranteeing victory, prophesying a Tuesday Game 7 in Washington, D.C.
How much was that belief worth? Exactly nothing if it amounted to empty delusion from the mouth of a man coaching one of the talentchallenged teams of recent Leafs past.
Talent ultimately wins in the NHL. And in the final analysis — after Washington’s 2-1 overtime victory ended a memorable Maple Leafs season — the Capitals were possessed of more.
Maybe they also had more mental fortitude than they’ve previously been given credit for. Coming into Sunday, the Alex Ovechkin-era Capitals owned a 5-15 win-loss record with a chance to clinch a best-of-seven series. Make that 6-15. And get ready for a showdown between Ovechkin and his longtime rival in the Pittsburgh sweater.
Still, a Leafs-Capitals Game 7 seemed like a plausible enough prospect for most of Sunday’s game, especially after a home-glass bounce set up Auston Matthews’ top-shelf goal with 12:15 to go in regulation and put the Leafs up 1-0. But Marcus Johansson snuck a puck through Frederik Andersen to tie it about five minutes later. And Johansson scored a little more than six minutes into an extra frame dominated by the visitors to finish it.
Before all that, the night was a coin flip — for two periods, it was about as good as a 0-0 game can get. Both teams came close to scoring. There were near-misses, sure. Jake Gardiner hit a crossbar. James van Riemsdyk hit a post. Andersen made big saves, particularly on Justin Williams and T.J. Oshie in tight.
Though 23 points separated these teams in the regular-season standings, there wasn’t much between them here. The Leafs looked like they believed they belonged. And maybe that had at least a little something to do with their coach repeatedly telling them as much.
“Where does (belief ) come from? It comes from within. Guys believing in one another. Our coach believing in us. Us believing in him,” Morgan Rielly, the veteran defenceman, said before the game. “It’s good to have positive vibes around the room.”
After it was over, Babcock said he was proud of his players.
“The reality is it’s a great year for our team,” he said. “It would have been great to play Game 7 in Washington.”
But Babcock isn’t some miracle worker. Talent wins, ultimately. Presiding over the end of a competitive era in Detroit before he came to Toronto, Babcock lost five of the previous six playoff series in which he partook. Now he’s lost six of his past seven.
You need more players to play deeper into the spring. And so maybe it wasn’t a surprise that he used his post-game press conference to launch into what sounded like an early free-agent recruiting pitch.
“If you’re not from Toronto and you come to Toronto, you have no idea how spectacular it is,” he said. “If you’re a good player and you like winning, this is the best place you could ever play. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s fantastic. So now we’ve got to have a team to match that opportunity. So, that’s what we’re going to try and build here over time.”
Putting a value on coaching in the National Hockey League is always a tricky assignment. There’s a case to be made that Babcock should be a frontrunner for the Jack Adams Award as the league’s coach of the year.
The Maple Leafs became just the third team this century to go from 30th place to the playoffs from one year to the next — this in a season in which almost every pundit was picking them for another spin at the draft lottery. And Babcock steered a rookie-laden roster that presumably needed every bit of his micro-managerial insight.
If you were to make a list of the reasons why the Leafs turned their operation around so stunningly, you’d rank Matthews, the assumed rookie of the year who scored for the fourth straight game, at the top of it. Mitch Marner, William Nylander and the rest of Toronto’s youthful injection of skill and speed wouldn’t be far behind. Ditto Frederik Andersen, the high-workload goaltender, who was, to use Babcock’s postgame word, “outstanding” again on Sunday.
But Babcock gets credit for big parts of all of it.
If the highest-paid coach in the game was brought here for anything, maybe it was to infuse Toronto’s NHLers with a sense of belief. He succeeded, and now it’s on to spreading the word to would-be Maple Leafs of a future that looks beyond bright.