The Top 5 Coaches in Toronto Maple Leafs History

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a rich history with many great coaches. We will rank the best of the best. These are the top five coaches in Leafs history.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have been putting pucks in nets for over 100 years. In that span, they have had 39 different head coaches. Some ran the team for years while others were limited to very short runs. Mike Rodden and Dick Duff for example just coached two games each.

With a long list of bench bosses, it becomes difficult to determine who was the best. We have analyzed the games, the stats, and each coach’s contribution to its team. Based on all those factors, we will unveil the top five coaches in Maple Leafs history.

The qualifying factors for making this list have to do with just coaching. There has already been a top-five general managers list for the franchise, so a coach’s contribution to team composition will not be considered.

By eliminating the management duties that some former coaches had, it will allow for a focus on just on-ice performance. The questions need to be asked, how did a coach elevate his team and what level of success did they achieve?

In Leafs history, 18 coaches had winning records in the regular season. That includes Conn Smythe, the former owner and general manager who had an even winning percentage. Incredibly, Smythe not only split his regular-season games, but his postseason ones too.

Since winning/points percentage will play a role in helping establish who was the best, we will first eliminate the coach who had the best percentage ever while at the helm.

That belonged to Frank Carroll. He coached the team in 1921 when the franchise was still called the St. Patricks. Carroll was running the lines for 24 games, won 15 of them and lost nine.

Note: information for this article came from wikipedia, hockeydb,and hockeyreference.com

That means he won 62.5-percent of his games. Carroll then lost both of his playoff games. Unfortunately for him, with such a small body of work, he is far removed from reaching the top five list.