Jimmy Firecracker
They Fired Sheldon!
That's an amazing amount of love for a coach that coached the Leafs to last place in the NHL. There's a phenomenal lack of talent on this team as there was last year, and the year before but in the previous 2 years TO made some noise and at times looked like the playoffs were possible, never a chance with Babs.
The OP noted Babs' propensity to play plugs with talent which is like his insistence on playing Grabner with Kadri, which is both ridiculous and stupid, and this is going to grate on us in time.
TO is an older team whose experience and hustle hasn't resulted in a better team just a different one. Babs has a team of players on their last legs whose performance this year will determine whether or not they will be in the NHL next year, an obvious incentive for the players to play better and harder than they have in years.
Babs is a shiny new toy who's shelf life will start to decrease next year, people will start to expect the hustle to be there, always, while also expecting far better results. Better results are going to be hard to provide if TO ever does actually promote the youth.
Babs is not rookie friendly, TO needs a coach that's willing to play the youth and endure the learning curve. He never had to endure any kind of losing in Detroit and he'll always turn to experience over youth.
I give him 3 more years, it's far easier to institute structure into an aging lineup, an experienced lineup but losing for the sake of structure will get old quick.
Babcock hasn't coached a young developing team since his days with Spokane. Since then he's always coached to win, with development of younger players taking a back seat. His teams have always been veteran laden and rookie who did make the team were in their early-mid twenties and already disciplined enough that he could expect better of them.
What I'm getting at is that we haven't really got any idea as to how Babcock is going to coach the Leafs who will be a young, developing team. Sure you can talk about how he handled young players in Detroit but the circumstances are drastically different. He coached those Wings teams to be competitive and win in the present, that won't be the case for the Leafs for a couple of years at least.