Reboot: Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe looks to a brighter future.
Hockey’s moment of reckoning is personal for coach, who saw sport’s dark side up close
There was a coach, once upon a Mike Babcock time, who spoke often of moulding hockey players into better men.
That’s not the job, of course. The job is to win.
When Babcock couldn’t do it with these Maple Leafs, he was fired in what felt like the blink of an eye. And that job passed to Sheldon Keefe.
What kind of man is he? Should we even ask? Does it matter?
Young, articulate, a breath of fresh air that immediately dispelled the heaviness which had enveloped the team, as if the players had been caught in a trough of low barometric pressure, the kind that makes the head throb and the nerve endings zap. Infused with a passion for hockey, for coaching, for positivity over haranguing negativity. The psychic uplift was instant.
And Keefe is much more one of them, in age proximity and character.
In a post-Babcock era, the Leafs — for all their chronic defects — have responded with enthusiasm, rebooted conviction and reignited moxie. It is not trite to say, with fun. There’d been precious little of that through the struggles of October and most of November as players and coach wore on each other. Babcock begged his players to grind, but instead he ground on them.
Keefe has possibly never used that word — grind — since assuming the reins. Rather, he’s encouraged them to fly. To become more the slick creative team envisioned by his boss, general manager Kyle Dubas, who constructed a team which embodied that doctrine.
The transformation has been manifest and manifold. But the man now behind the bench is himself an avatar of transformative reinvention.
As not much more than a boy, Keefe fell in thrall to a terrible human being: David Frost. It’s a subject scarcely mentioned these days and Keefe is long removed from the manipulated, compliant — also cocky and stroppy — adolescent he was, caught up in the bizarre cult of Frost that included, most notoriously, Mike Danton. Mesmerized by and in mental bondage to a toxic Svengali-agent who gnawed at the bones of his impressionable acolytes.
The question is asked: Has Frost contacted Keefe since he was named the 40th head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs? “No. Never.” We’ll set that aside for now and return to it later. Because, to be fair, the measure of Keefe will be drawn from how he acquits himself in his current position, what defines The Sheldon Way of doing hockey.