Did Babcock have it right to begin with?

[Dekes For Days]

But ultimately lost to them

Which may be all that matters to you, but it's not all that matters. The Leafs were a great team during the regular season, and won their division, posting their best ever point pace and extremely strong underlying metrics. The Leafs outplayed Montreal in the series, and outscored them in the series, even without one of the biggest pieces of their team and captain. The only team to do better against cup finalist Montreal was the back-to-back cup champions who were exploiting a loophole for a massive advantage. And throughout the playoffs, every star they faced had underwhelming production, except for Nylander. The Leafs have a great offense, a great defense, and a great goaltender moving forward. They went 3-4 through a 7 game sample with irregular circumstances. That's hockey, and while you may value that small sample highly, it doesn't actually change the quality of team they are.

 

[Racer88]

Which may be all that matters to you, but it's not all that matters. The Leafs were a great team during the regular season, and won their division, posting their best ever point pace and extremely strong underlying metrics. The Leafs outplayed Montreal in the series, and outscored them in the series, even without one of the biggest pieces of their team and captain. The only team to do better against cup finalist Montreal was the back-to-back cup champions who were exploiting a loophole for a massive advantage. And throughout the playoffs, every star they faced had underwhelming production, except for Nylander. The Leafs have a great offense, a great defense, and a great goaltender moving forward. They went 3-4 through a 7 game sample with irregular circumstances. That's hockey, and while you may value that small sample highly, it doesn't actually change the quality of team they are.

Of course the result is what I care about. Sports is about winning. There is no participation awards, you need to win.
You are complicating things with phrases like irregular circumstances, underwhelming production, it’s much simpler then that.
As far as a great offence, yes on paper it might seem like that but Marner hasn’t scored a playoff goal in almost 3 years, he hasn’t scored a PP goal in almost a year, the Leafs PP has been almost the worst in the league for the last half of the season. Wouldn’t you think great offence should be able to score. It can’t be all bad luck.
5 years of failure says a lot about the quality of the team

 

[PromisedLand]

You mean we can’t do 200 on the highway………..

the car I drive would go up in flames if I tried 200

 

[Dekes For Days]

Of course the result is what I care about. Sports is about winning.

But you don't win by making your team worse because you're basing team-altering decisions on ignoring everything other than one particular surface result from one particular set of games, which don't even accurately represent the potential of the team you've built because it's missing such a massive piece.

As far as a great offence, yes on paper it might seem like that

Leafs were 5th in the league offensively this year, despite it being a down year for the PP. Not just on paper.

but Marner hasn’t scored a playoff goal in almost 3 years, he hasn’t scored a PP goal in almost a year

I get that these things are disappointing, and they've become a rallying cry, but it's hard to have an actual discussion about Marner when such cherry-picked things like this are used to wildly exaggerate the issue. Marner may not be an elite goal-scorer, but he is an amazing player regardless. This is like judging Ovechkin by his assist totals, or Thornton by his goal totals. For the record, Marner just came off of the best ES goal scoring year of his career. Weird how that's never mentioned.

the Leafs PP has been almost the worst in the league for the last half of the season.

Yes, and that's disappointing, but it's not because of a lack of talent or PP ability in our stars. It also came after we were on absolute fire and scoring like crazy on the PP for the first half of the season

5 years of failure says a lot about the quality of the team

A "team" is not the same just because the logo on the front is the same.

 

[The CyNick]

Which may be all that matters to you, but it's not all that matters. The Leafs were a great team during the regular season, and won their division, posting their best ever point pace and extremely strong underlying metrics. The Leafs outplayed Montreal in the series, and outscored them in the series, even without one of the biggest pieces of their team and captain. The only team to do better against cup finalist Montreal was the back-to-back cup champions who were exploiting a loophole for a massive advantage. And throughout the playoffs, every star they faced had underwhelming production, except for Nylander. The Leafs have a great offense, a great defense, and a great goaltender moving forward. They went 3-4 through a 7 game sample with irregular circumstances. That's hockey, and while you may value that small sample highly, it doesn't actually change the quality of team they are.

Sounds like Leafs should run it back and collect another expected Stanley Cup.

 

[The CyNick]

Of course the result is what I care about. Sports is about winning. There is no participation awards, you need to win.
You are complicating things with phrases like irregular circumstances, underwhelming production, it’s much simpler then that.
As far as a great offence, yes on paper it might seem like that but Marner hasn’t scored a playoff goal in almost 3 years, he hasn’t scored a PP goal in almost a year, the Leafs PP has been almost the worst in the league for the last half of the season. Wouldn’t you think great offence should be able to score. It can’t be all bad luck.
5 years of failure says a lot about the quality of the team

Every goalie in the league was ON FIRE during Leafs PPs. That's why numbers were down.

Had nothing to do with being extremely predictable and having no threats to shoot outside Matthews.

 

[Racer88]

the car I drive would go up in flames if I tried 200

Hahaha

 

[Racer88]

“One particular surface result”……… that particular result is everything the team exists for.
For 11 million Marner better dam well score a goal or two when we really need it.
Tavares is not a massive piece missing during that series……we had him for other series and no success. A good argument could be made that we have been worse since he came here and the Islanders have had more success since he left
The Leafs were 5th in the league in scoring until it really mattered.
They had a good PP at the start of the year until the games got more serious and the other teams figured out that they were a PP 1 trick pony

 

[stonec]

Leafs needed discipline and structure. Babcock provided it. That’s why he was recruited and paid handsomely.

(Same with Lou)

Problem is the star players revolted. Wanted more of a say. Wanted more ice time. Wanted to play with certain players.

They got what they wanted.

And haven’t proven Babcock wrong.

Well, the end result is the same with Babcock and Keefe. Maybe we should look at what coaches who actually are successful do instead of reminiscing about Babcock. What type of coaches are Cooper and Ducharme for example?

Everything I have read about Cooper is that he is a players' coach. Cooper came to hockey as some Wall Street guy with a law degree, which doesn't sound anything like Babcock to me, but yet he is capable of extracting the most out of superstars like Kucherov or Point. Ducharme is another coach who seems a lot more on level with the players and almost the polar opposite of what they had in Julien.

So no, I don't believe that simply bringing in discipline and structure is necessarily the solution if other teams are moving away from old-school coaches, but still have success.

 

[Pookie]

Babcock and Lou were brought in because of the off ice issues that surrounded the team.

TSN documented that a Leafs exec went to the Toronto Police regarding cocaine use (and the environment that goes with it) in 2015.

 

[34]

Babcock or Keefe can’t really be blamed for the failure of the Leafs.

There is not a coach in the world that could have success with the garbage roster in Toronto. It is a failed rebuild, epic failure! This team will never win anything with guys like Marner making $11M a season.

The beginning of the end for this current core, is the day that Dubas sign Tavares. That was the end of it.

The team just sucks, it is not a coaching issue.

 

[Le Cobra]

M&M on the power play only/OT when the game is on the line. They could have a line with McDavid Marner and Matthews but its not gonna change that this team has no heart and is not playoff ready

 

[rumman]

I think he included playoffs disappointment though. Our fanbase was never ready for the reality of building year over year. All many of us saw was a 1st round exit. Not that it was a 1st round exit to Stanley Cup, veteran star ladened teams. Those losses, painful...as they were, weren't the result of a bad team, but a young team learning.

What we witnessed against Montreal was a misstep. An indication that the process was interrupted and perhaps derailed.

The hope has to be that it's not beyond repair.

But Babcock the coach wasn't the problem despite the vultures. He made a mistake in Toronto with a player. A player incidentally enough who has drawn the ire of the fanbase, seemingly, for the same thing Babcock had a problem with.

Maturity by necessity takes time. I hope that time is reinvested into Toronto's future rather than allowed to walk for nothing. That will be the club's absolute low point should we get there. And then, we'll be forced to repeat the same lessons again.

Good post.

 

[rumman]

We have a GM who is dead set on stuff too.
Put half the cap to 4 forwards and don’t change till it works.
Which might be fine for 2,3,4 tries but we are going 6 now.

Coaching has been a problem, but not the REAL problem.

 

[rumman]

But this thread isn't a comparison. Babcock is trash and no one touching him.

I think he’s making the Leafs pay his full ticket out of spite, he’ll be back when his deal expires of this I am sure.

 

[rumman]

It’s so funny here sometimes, HOF GM and future HOF Coach and they are shown so little respect, yet people who’ve done absolutely jack freaking squat in this league are revered as genius. It’s the weirdest thing going.

Sadly this is the world we now live in, backwards day 24-7.

 

[rumman]

lol No they weren't, Mike Babcock was fired in November, not February . The legend of Sheldon Keefe is growing each day it seems

Funny how some think pushing a narrative will somehow make it become reality.

 

[rumman]

The same posters here that wanted a HOF GM in Lou Lamoriello replaced by Kyle Dubas, because supposedly, Lou was too old and out of touch, are the same group who wanted Babcock fired and replaced by Keefe.

So let’s see, what has Lou done since he left?

Oh just completely turned around the perennial basement dwelling New York Islanders, gotten them into the second round of the playoffs in his first year and then taken them into the conference finals the next two years and in the process won the GM of the year in back to back seasons.

So with all due respect, hopefully you’ll forgive me and many others here, who get just a little bit frustrated having to listen now to all the creatively lame excuses about why Dubas has failed to make any progress in moving the Leafs forward, especially when they appeared to be well on their way to finally doing something significant with the GM you wanted replaced.

The bottom line here is you got the GM you pushed for, you got the coach your GM supposedly needed and the results have been very underwhelming.

So perhaps remedy your misjudgment by; stopping the non-stop excuses, suggesting more time is needed and just own the results of your misjudgment.

I’m sorry, but Dubas just isn’t the great GM you thought he would be and he’ll most likely be replaced after this year, by someone with more experience after we have wasted 4 years figuring out what many of us already knew, which was, Dubas wasn’t ready to be the GM of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Amen, so endth the lesson.

 

[rumman]

Thank heavens there's no more friction.

Now we're losing, with everyone on the same page!

 

[rumman]

Exactly. A team that can’t win brings in a guy who never won.

Worked with Marleau why not Jumbo, probably looked good on paper?

 

[cannucky]

Amen, so endth the lesson.

I lost my like button again so LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE ...........

 

[rumman]

Well we're talking about leadership.. Effective leadership is most effective when the personalities of the team are understood. Core personality traits are reflective of their upbringing which has changed through each generation. The coaches ability to adapt and understand those personalities in the room can have a major impact on how the team performs.

Typically speaking the younger generations respond better to a leadership style that lends itself to input and feedback which leads to increased motivation and team commitment, rather than just dictation and fear mongering tactics. Conclusively it's no surprise that the young Leafs eventually tuned Babcock out because he wouldn't adapt to their personalities.

Babcock has the resume that gave him the ego to say it's his way or not. But he failed massively in his leadership style with this group because he didn't adapt his style to effectively motivate them. It's probably why the Red Wings were successful in his tenure, because it was an older team and that style of leadership motivated them appropriately.

Tell that to the Marines, they drive out the individual and instill a concept of “us” condensing each person being less than the whole of the unit/team.

 

[rumman]

I lost my like button again so LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE LIKE ...........

Me too, a lot of that going around.

 

[egd27]

Who said a thing about Marner?

Why do you assume this is just about Marner?

Because the Marner "list" is the Babcock equivalent to Lou's Marleau contract. It's the crutch that the Dubites roll out over and over and over.

 

[usernamezrhardtodo]

I’m betting none of this is a problem if Dubas didn’t sign Tavares any further complicate things with his choice of coach

In the end..it all goes back to signing JT. We accelerated the rebuild by a few years and threw our internal cap structure out the window with that signing. How you can expect AM to take less than 11m when he is a younger better player than JT is mind boggling. Had we just practiced some patience...we would have been a lot further along by now.