Toronto Maple Leafs Are Not Firing Mike Babcock If they Lose in 1st Round

The Toronto Maple Leafs are 20 games over .500 but you wouldn’t know it by the way people talk about the team.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a young, stacked team in the first year of their competitive window, yet people discuss them like they’re washed up losers going for one last swipe of glory.

The things they say don’t  line up, at all, with the reality of the team.

Whether it’s people ignoring mountains of visual and statistical evidence and pretending Jake Gardner is a bad player, or whether it’s completely ignoring a decade long trend and citing toughness as the reason the Leafs are “only” 20 games over .500, I just don’t even know anymore.

I turned on my radio the other day and heard a perfectly earnest broadcast veteran talk about the Islanders as if they were better than the Leafs, like we don’t have stats that show a bad team can win a lot when they get really good goaltending.

This Week’s Insanity

This week’s terrible Leafs Nation take:  Firing Mike Babcock if the Leafs don’t get by the first round.

I’ve got people telling me the Leafs should fire their coach if they don’t go beyond the first round, as if that’s not completely arbitrary.

A first round series against the Bruins is a statistical coin-flip.  Whichever team gets home ice advantage has a slightly less than 50% chance of losing, so basing the future of the team on a coin flip is incredibly silly.

If the Leafs don’t get past the first round for the third year in a row, it seems really bad until you realize something: the first year they lost, they weren’t even supposed to make the playoffs.

Season one was a massive over-achievement, so you can’t turn around and use it as justification for a failure in the future.

Season two featured a young team up against a 112 points powerhouse with the (by far) best line in the NHL.  In this series, the Toronto Maple Leafs lost their #2 centre for a three game suspension, started on the road, and still managed to take it to the last minutes of game seven before losing.

Sure, they lost in heartbreaking fashion, but people seem to forget that if they had won it would have been a MASSIVE upset.

So get out of here with this “three years of first round exits is a failure” crap.

The Leafs are a young team on the rise.  People act like this is their last chance to win, when really, this is the first season where they are actually expected to be a contender.

If they lose in the first round, which is a distinct possibility even if they play really well, the Toronto Maple Leafs should stay the course.  Making changes based on an arbitrary result is exactly where and why most teams screw up.

The Leafs clearly have a plan, and if that plan involves a new coach (it doesn’t), they should make the change win or lose.  But basing a decision on the results of a random event is a clear breakdown of critical thinking, and is an example of caprice, not good management.