Babcock’s firing puts the spotlight on Leafs GM
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.— The funny thing was, Mike Babcock had rarely looked happier. On the day of his firing as head coach of the Maple Leafs, with his team mired in a six-game winless streak, Babcock met the media with a perma-smile attached his face.
Often known for his clipped, allbusiness demeanour during much of his tenure, Babcock was downright affable in the moments after he put the team through what turned out to be his final practice in a Maple Leafs sweatsuit. He joked about the unusually gloomy and wet Arizona weather. He rationalized the team’s flagging fortunes with an old trope about the sun still coming up in the morning.
“As you know, today it didn’t,” he said.
He was referencing heavy cloud cover. But he might as well have been foreshadowing his doom as the 30th coach in the team’s NHL history. That’s not to suggest the 56-year-old Babcock would have necessarily been happy to hear the news, delivered by team president Brendan Shanahan and general manager Kyle Dubas, that he’d been relieved of his duties and replaced by 39-year-old Marlies coach Sheldon Keefe, he of the zero career games as an NHL coach, assistant or otherwise. Nobody with an ego the size of Babcock’s likes to be told they’re something less than all-knowing and all-seeing.
But lately you could certainly sense an odd peace in Babcock’s demeanour that seemed to grow in direct proportion to the length of his team’s ongoing slide.
Only the lowly Devils, Senators and Red Wings sat below the Leafs in the Eastern standings on Wednesday if you measured by points percentage. But Babcock has been acting like a man on top of the world. Even Auston Matthews — the Leafs’ leading scorer, who has carried on an at times fractious relationship with the coach that’s required at least a couple of Babcock house calls to the Matthews family home here in Arizona — expressed some admiration for Babcock’s positivity in the hours before the coach was fired.
“Everybody in the locker room has been trying to be positive and I think (Babcock) has been at the forefront of that — just staying positive, making sure we’re not hanging our heads.”
Explained Babcock earlier this week: “I’m in a good spot.”
In other words, he’s in the fifth year of a heavily frontloaded eight-year contract worth $50 million (U.S.), the richest coaching deal in his sport’s history.
He’s wealthy beyond his wildest Saskatchewan dreams. He’s got two Olympic gold medals and a Stanley Cup ring to his name.
He’ll get another job soon enough. So if the whiz-kid boss’s plan to reinvent hockey doesn’t include him — hey, have at it, Dubie. Babcock seemed like a guy happy enough to take MLSE’s money to hate-watch the underachieving Leafs on TV.
Whoever’s watching — and Thursday’s game against the Coyotes figures to be a matter of huge interest — the spotlight is now truly Dubas’s.
The roster he’s constructed is failing badly. Stacked almost exclusively with offence-first players and prioritizing puckmoving speed and skill above all other qualities, it’s glaringly short on diversity — the traditional mixing in of, say, a grit guy here or shutdown obsessed try-hard there.
Right or wrong, on Wednesday Shanahan essentially made it clear that he’s willing to believe in Dubas’s vision of the team — or at least that Dubas’s vision needs a fairer shake from a coach who’s also a believer.
“Our game is not really meeting our expectations,” Shanahan said. “We’re mistakeprone on defence. The attention to details aren’t there. And even the offence … the explosive offensive team we were known as has been missing for a while now. So there’s a lot of work for Sheldon to do. And there’s a lot of work for the players to do. And they understand that, but we really believe in them. We believe in the players that we have here.”
That’s got to be the company line when you’re in the midst of trying to salvage a tailspinning season. But more than one player has insisted lately the problems aren’t a matter of X’s and O’s. Which would suggest it has something to do with the Jimmys and the Joes — or maybe the Tysons and the Codys, Barrie and Ceci, to name a couple of struggling Toronto defencemen acquired by Dubas in the off-season whose opening 23 games have amounted to epic pratfalls on the sport’s biggest stage.
If Keefe can’t find the answer to what Shanahan called “the magic question” — i.e. why does this talent-stacked team stink? — the magic question will soon enough change. Faulty roster construction, including Dubas’s unprecedented splurge of about 50 per cent of the salary cap on four players, will soon enough be seen as the culprit.
Not that Keefe doesn’t deserve a shot. It only makes sense that a GM and coach would exist as like-minded allies, a state of being Dubas and Babcock never achieved. Certainly it said something that Babcock, in post-firing remarks to TSN’s Pierre LeBrun, went to great lengths to thank MLSE chairman Larry Tanenbaum and praise former GM Lou Lamoriello, this while making no such prominent mention of Dubas or Shanahan.
Keefe and Dubas won a Calder Cup together with the Marlies a couple of seasons back, and there are obvious historic precedents for inseason coaching changes spurring success.
Wednesday marked the oneyear anniversary of the St. Louis Blues firing another head coach named Mike — Mike Yeo — en route to a turnaround that won them the Stanley Cup. Then again, it’s important to point out that Craig Berube’s magical run as Blues coach coincided with the exit of struggling goaltender Jake Allen and the elite emergence of Cup linchpin Jordan Binnington.
Still, the question for Shanahan, who played for Babcock and hired him, was: Why now? There were vigorous discussions within the organization after all about firing Babcock in the wake of last season’s second straight playoff failure in Boston. Lamoriello, Babcock’s spirit animal of an executive, had departed the previous off-season. Dubas was bent on remaking the roster in an image that clearly didn’t suit Babcock’s defence-and-grind leanings. There were those inside the team who considered keeping the coach around to be prolonging the inevitable. Now that the inevitable has arrived, more than a quarter of an important season has been squandered.
And an era that began with giddy promise has ended in another Toronto debacle. Babcock, when he was hired as a highly coveted free agent in 2015, was the biggest name in coaching, arriving in the hugest market in the sport. He promptly became the face of the franchise, and until Wednesday had mostly remained as such, absorbing a massive amount of the daily heat generated around a heritage club with a massive base of fans and detractors. Now that he’s gone, things change.
The sun didn’t come up for Babcock on Wednesday in the desert. But the temperature in the Leafs front office somehow just got decidedly hotter.