Toronto Maple Leafs: Mike Babcock is Regrettably At it Again

This past season, the Toronto Maple Leafs lost their second consecutive first-round series to the Boston Bruins in their second consecutive game seven.

A large portion of the blame for that falls on the shoulders of their coach.

You see, as the highest-paid bench boss in hockey, Mike Babcock is held to a standard that other coaches who lack his reputation simply are not. Babcock’s gargantuan salary and inflated resume dictate that he is to ice a contending team year after year. He’s also expected to manage his bench with any semblance of competency. And, perhaps most importantly, Babcock is expected above all else to play his best (read: friggin’ superstar) players in the moments when the stakes are at their highest.

Funnily enough, he didn’t do any of those things last year.

Sure, the Maple Leafs were a contender on paper, but a roster is only as powerful as the person who deploys it. And when that person is someone who happily tosses out Patrick Marleau and Connor Brown in the third period of a game seven while Auston Matthews and John Tavares watch wistfully from the bench, there’s only so much a paper roster can do.

Of course, since we’re in the dog days of summer, Babcock spoke publicly on the topic of Matthews’ ice time for the first time in a while yesterday in an interview with The Hockey News’s Matt Larkin.

The full transcript can be found below.

There are a few ways to look at this.

For one, Babcock is correct in saying that, for Matthews to be as good as possible, his usage sweet spot is right around 19-or-so minutes. On a random Tuesday night in February in Columbus, there’s just no reason to drive your franchise face into the ground (although Babcock was more than happy to do that to the Leafs’ geriatric top-pair RHD, Ron Hainsey).

That’s not the problem here. We just came off a season in which the Raptors load managed Kawhi Leonard all the way to a championship. Limiting any unnecessary strain on your stars is the way to go. Where the real problem surfaces is in the playoffs, when even a single second cannot be wasted on a sub-par option – something which Babcock seemingly went out of his way to avoid addressing.

Here’s the thing: Babcock knows the motivation behind Larkin’s question.

He’s not an idiot. Babcock is clearly aware of the (justified) criticism he faced from fans and media alike after last season’s disappointing result and chose to answer it to Larkin in a way that made him seem oblivious.

Have you heard Mike Babcock take even a single sliver of blame for how the Leafs’ 2018-19 season ended? Have you heard him toss out a half-hearted “that’s on me” or “I’ve got to be better”? Look, maybe he actually has said those things and I just haven’t heard them. In which case, good on you, Mike.

But after one of the most abysmal coaching performances in recent memory, the profession’s high-paid member – who also happens to have built a brand on the concept of “accountability”, remember – has taken none of it. Zero. The guy with a pair of generational centres who willfully iced Frederik freakin’ Gauthier in the third period of a game seven while down by two goals instead has not taken even one step back and offered a sincere “my bad”.

That is garbage. I’m sorry, but it is.

Maybe Babcock emerges from this summer a new man. Maybe he recognizes his errors in private, changes his entire philosophy, and mercifully begins coaching the Leafs like a hockey team that exists in 2019 instead of 2009. Maybe the guy makes me eat my words. Honestly, there’s nothing I’d love more than to look like an idiot here.

But really ask yourself: Do you see that happening? Truly?

Something tells me, in the back of my stupid, stupid brain, that I’m dreaming in technicolour here; that I’m a fool for believing a notoriously stubborn (to the point of delusion) old dog can learn new tricks.

I guess we’ll have to wait until the season starts to find out. Hopefully, Auston Matthews and his literally historic first three NHL seasons can “earn what he gets”.