Mike Babcock is, among many things, the richest coach in the NHL, a two-time Olympic gold medallist and a Stanley Cup champion. On Monday he also confirmed himself as the worst hype man in pro sports.
Just listen to the way Babcock framed the narrative around Tuesday afternoon’s game between his Maple Leafs and the visiting Carolina Hurricanes at the Air Canada Centre.
“It’s going to be tight. There’s going to be no room,” Babcock said of the impending on-ice traffic jam, before adding the carnival-barking capper. “It’s going to be one of those games where it looks like there’s hardly any plays taking place whatsoever.”
He said those words — “hardly any plays taking place whatsoever” — with scary gusto. Clearly this is Babcock’s idealized NHL, the Nothing Happens League. He and his control-freak coaching brethren like it best that way. Nothing horrified Babcock more than the Leafs scoring 19 goals in their opening three games this season. Now that they’ve scored a combined 10 goals in seven games in December . . . hey, this is more like it.
It’s easy to make fun of Babcock for this, of course. And looking at it from 30,000 feet, it’s easy to criticize the league’s leadership for allowing its coaches to wilfully and profitably strangle the fun out of a great sport. But if you’re a fan of the Maple Leafs, and all you’re in it for is to see your beloved club win a Stanley Cup some time between now and the hereafter, Babcock’s take on hockey aesthetics is entirely appropriate. It doesn’t matter how it looks as long as it ends in a “W.”
Listening to the sudden flood of Babcock-focused criticism around town, it’s easy to forget the whole reason Babcock was brought here. He was brought here, not to set off offensive fireworks, but to remake a broken dressing-room culture that had proven itself unfit to represent the Maple Leaf.
You’ll remember the pre-Babcock Leafs, the team whose best player was permitted to treat defence as optional because he was, in the words of then-coach Randy Carlyle, an “artist.”
“I think there is a double standard in sports that talented people have to be given a bit more of a rope,” Carlyle said in the fall of 2014.
Carlyle was fired a few months later. And a few months after that, Babcock was brought aboard and the artist shipped out. It’s important to remember who oversaw all those moves. It was Brendan Shanahan, the team president who played for Babcock when the coach began a 10-season run in Detroit in 2005-06. Babcock, then and now, made it clear that double standards weren’t a part of his organizational template.
“Accountability is for everyone. Otherwise, it becomes a superstar mentality. That’s not winning hockey,” Babcock said in 2005.
As much as the league has changed in the past decade-plus, Babcock is saying essentially the same thing today.
“If you want to be a star, you have to dig in, put the team first and learn how to play without the puck,” Babcock said this week.
It is debatable whether or not Babcock is handling the sophomore seasons of William Nylander and Mitch Marner with a genius’s touch. There are folks who reside in the camps of both players who’ll tell you they will eventually succeed in spite of Babcock’s methods, not because of them.
But what can’t be argued is that Babcock is doing what his track record said he’d do: insisting on accountability in every zone from every player. Babcock made those demands previously with Morgan Rielly, denying the Leafs’ best defenceman an offensive leash until Rielly proved himself competent in tending to less glamorous details. He did it with Nazem Kadri, too, sometimes to Kadri’s chagrin.
“There was tons of (frustration)” during frequent early tutorials in Babcock’s office, Kadri said Monday. “As an offensive player, having offensive instincts, you don’t want to waste your energy tracking back. But you have to understand you have to work smart, you have to work efficient, and I think we’re in good enough shape that you can have juice for both ends.”
Watching the offensive struggles of Nylander and Marner this season, Kadri said he often sees his former self.
“That’s exactly how I used to be,” Kadri said. “There’s no question in my mind that those guys are going to become better defensively and more reliable and responsible . . . You start to understand playing good defence translates into offensive chances, because you frustrate teams, you end up forcing turnovers, then you have the puck on your stick. That’s one thing I had to get through my head, and I’m sure (Marner and Nylander will) get it through theirs.”
Babcock’s career resume comes with a conversation stopper. When critics groan about his defence-first, excitement-snuffing ways, he can point out that, in the span of 10 seasons in Detroit, no NHL team scored more goals than the Red Wings (and only the Rangers, Devils and Sharks allowed fewer per game).
“The new guys coming in, if they don’t turn out to be good pros, then it’s on us,” Babcock said Monday. “So that’s having a great culture here. That’s why (Patrick) Marleau’s here. That’s why (Ron) Hainsey’s here. That’s why we tried to make the organization better so that there’s no wiggle room for these guys. Because most people follow the path of least resistance. Sometimes that’s not to the weight room.”
Babcock’s demands for diligence aren’t translating into offence right now. The Leafs have scored a combined four goals in the past four games, all without the services of top-scoring centre Auston Matthews, who isn’t expected to play Tuesday, either. It’s a rough patch, for sure. But Babcock appears to be successfully making the case around the room that it’s a rough patch with instructional purposes.
“We know this team can fly (offensively). But we know we can’t win that way in the playoffs,” Rielly said. “That’s just the way this league is.”
The way this league is, it’s hard to make a case Toronto’s season is in imminent peril. In other words, the Maple Leafs, still a solid bet to finish second in the not-deep Atlantic Division, currently have the competitive leeway to stick to the principles. And Babcock, with five more years remaining on his $50-million deal, can make the case he’ll have another luxury for some time to come: the luxury of not caring how ugly it looks on paper or in person.