Rosie DiManno
Coaches never win grudge matches with their stars,
The best hockey coach extant wasn’t Maple Leafs-proof.
And the “pain” Mike Babcock warned about his first day on the job has been extracted from his own flesh.
Nobody could have anticipated Babcock would last just four-plus seasons and three straight playoff appearances, if never beyond the first round. So he had that albatross.
But this is what inevitably happens to Toronto coaches: a half-dozen of them canned in this millennium, Babcock joining Pat Quinn, Paul Maurice, Ron Wilson, Randy Carlyle and (interim) Peter Horachek as The Discarded.
Because, as everybody knows, you can’t fire the players. Whether this move fires up the players, under incoming Sheldon Keefe, remains to be seen. Historically under such circumstances, only a modest bump in fortunes has resulted. It’s rarely real — the St. Louis Blues last season a gobsmacking anomaly.
The crucial question, post-Babcock: How real is this mess of a Leafs team, mired in a six-game losing skid. Few believe that’s who the Leafs are, with their embarrassment of marquee player riches and a top-drawer netminder. The inexplicable part is how they sank to such sad-sack depths, outside a wildcard spot in the Eastern Conference, in what feels like the blink of an eye.
For all their talents, the Leafs have played laggard, raggedy hockey since the campaign began. Yes, there were significant injuries. They never got healthy, even as the long-term rehabs returned to the lineup. But the frail defence was a continuing consternation as the blue line steadfastly regressed, Tyson Barrie — a Kyle Dubas get — the most boldface bust. Again, that goes under the Dubas debit ledger.
No pushback across the lineup, no extra effort, no emotional engagement, no giving their own heads a good shake. Too many players just doing their own lah-di-dah thing, outside the structure the coaching staff attempted to impose. And maybe that structure was a poor fit for this collection of players. Babcock wanted them to grind and cycle, they wanted to gild the offence and fly. Babcock was at odds with his personnel and his boss. The worst consequence was that even the team’s defining elite skill and signature speed had withered away
in the smash-up between Babcock’s system and the players’ will.
They looked like they had not a clue what they were doing or supposed to do.
It is a humiliation for Babcock, who’s never been axed before. No one should take any pleasure in his comeuppance, no matter how much of a thorny pain in the arse he’s been throughout his Toronto tenure. By the end, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of players who were still listening. It was obvious in that excruciating turtling of a loss in Pittsburgh on Saturday that the players had checked out.
Two days ago, Babcock said he always bets on Mike Babcock. Came up craps Wednesday.
“We didn’t have the start to the year that we wanted and that’s on me,” he said in a statement released early Wednesday evening.
In the crucible, Babcock couldn’t change. Obstinacy got in the way. Any compromise was only half-hearted. But it should have been expected that a coach who compelled deadened, all-D hockey on the greatest collection of hockey players ever — his back-toback gold-medal-winning Olympic teams — would not bend to a callow rookie GM.
Of course, Babcock’s fate had been hanging by a filament since the Leafs were eliminated by Boston in Game 7 last April. Almost two weeks passed before Dubas confirmed that Babcock would be behind the bench to start the 2019-20 season. Not his coach, never hired him and the friction was always evident. Dubas now has the coach he always wanted in Keefe, who doesn’t have one day of NHL coaching experience on his resumé.
But this yank puts Dubas squarely in the crosshairs. The hockey executive who assembled this roster, manifestly constructed counterintuitively to what his coach preferred. The boss who clamped the franchise into a salary cap straitjacket. The iconoclast GM who created — and then was never able to resolve — his backup goaltending dilemma.
In his brief comments after practice on Wednesday, Babcock gave no indication that he sensed the guillotine was about to drop. But he’s a coy fellow. Both Dubas and team president Brendan Shanahan had already made an emergency drop in Arizona.
Notable, I think, that the announcement of Babcock being “relieved” of his duties came from Shanahan, not the general manager. This seemed intended to spare his GM at least a little bit of the media heat. And of course the buck — 50 million bucks actually, for Babcock — stops at Shanahan’s desk. The president may have drank Dubas’s Kool-Aid, but the overall vision is his, even if inimically antithetical to the sinewy hockey he brought to his own Hall of Fame career.
Babcock’s work ethic, his commitment to detail, is unstinting. But his own personality — the inflexibility, unwillingness to experiment significantly, that damn fourth-line faceoff lock-in after a Leaf goal — portended his downfall, while gradually alienating much of the team’s leadership group.
There were few left — mostly peripheral elements — whose fortunes were directly tied to Babcock. Much broader is the bracket of Leafs who should thrive with a coaching change. Coaches will never win a grudge match with their star players. Babcock didn’t believe such adages applied to him.
The crisis pendulum struck midnight in the last 24 hours.
“It was unfortunate to have the conversation we did today,” Shanahan told reporters in Glendale, as Dubas was speaking to the players and staff. “It wasn’t an easy conversation to have, it wasn’t pleasant. Days like today are not. But it was what we felt was important for the club. Once you realize that there’s something you should do and have to do, then it’s best to act on it.”
They didn’t act after Game 7. They tried instead to bring
Babcock to heel, somewhat, by surrounding him with new assistants. Which has proved a dud move — the Leafs floundering on special teams. And it seemed clear there was no rush to judge Babcock this season, but rather a reluctance to take bold action precipitously, in the hope the team’s issues could be straightened out. Instead, they metastasized.
“It really just came down to the last couple of weeks,” said Shanahan. “We’d got to the point where we spoke in the last 48 hours. I just felt it was something that needed to be done, and Kyle felt the same way. Seeing as I was the one who had hired Mike, I thought it was very important for me to get on a plane this morning and face Mike … to tell him myself that we had made a decision together that we thought was in the best interest of the club.”
Shanahan saw what all of Leafland has seen: A team unrecognizable and sliding hard. A team that hasn’t played anywhere near to its expectations, that looked addled and unhinged. “Our game is not really meeting our expectations. We’re mistake-prone on defence. The details aren’t there. Even the explosive offence our team was known for has been missing for a while now.”
Yet Shanahan emphasized he still has faith in the players, as he well should. There are so many studs in this lineup. It beggars belief that they’ve been so bad. They are fully capable of turning this around sharply.
Maybe Babcock, who brought respect back to the Leafs ahead of schedule, ended up being the weak link instead. Or the boil that had to be lanced.
Too soon or too late gone, the Babcock Era leaves a bitter aftertaste.