Top 5 Worst Coaches in Toronto Maple Leafs Team History
The Toronto Maple Leafs have been blessed with good coaching for the last few years, but that’s not always been the case.
With 40 total coaches in Toronto Maple Leafs history, there have been plenty of different personalities behind the bench.
Criticize Mike Babcock all you want (and I have), if we were to reverse this list, he’s probably in the top-five for best coaches in Toronto history.
However, he’s definitely had his flaws and there’s a reason why he was fired last November.
Babcock was stubborn and thought that because he’s been successful before, he would continue to be successful again by keeping his old ways.
There were a number of positives with Babcock, though. For one, he took the worst team in the league and lead them to the playoffs one year later. When the Leafs tanked and started the rebuild, many expected it to be at least three years until the team was relevant again, and fans had accepted that.
However, with Babcock behind the bench, the team went to the playoffs three consecutive seasons and continue to be a contender again this year. Maybe it wasn’t all due to coaching, but you have to give props to him for speeding up the development process.
Regardless of the good things that Babcock did, there were plenty of coaches before him that weren’t as revered.
In professional hockey, coaching comes down to one thing: winning.
If your team doesn’t win when you’re behind the bench, you’re not going to have a job for that long. Although that’s unfair at times, that’s just the way it is.
Let’s look at the top-five worst coaches in Leafs history.
#5. Peter Horachek
The name Peter Horachek still haunts Toronto Maple Leafs Leafs fans.
He may only have coached the team for 42 games in the 2014-15 season, but those 42 games were depressing.
It was shocking that fans weren’t throwing waffles on the ice or putting bags on their heads more often at games because this stretch of hockey was a joke.
After Randy Carlyle was fired mid-way through the season, the Leafs decided to promote assistant coach Horachek for the rest of the season.
At the time this move made sense. Horachek had NHL head coaching experience with the Florida Panthers, so there was no reason to bring in an interim coach when he was already on the payroll.
When Horachek took over, the Leafs were not in a terrible situation. They had just gone through a tough 2-7 stretch, but were 21-16-3 for the season. The coaching change was seen more as a spark to uplift the team towards a playoff spot.
That didn’t happen, though.
The Horachek experience was like a horror-film. The team went from playoff contention to the 27th best team in the NHL. With Horachek behind the bench, he went 9-28-5 overall, and 1-19-3 on the road.
Yikes!
Similar to Carlyle, Leafs fans have plenty to be thankful for because of Horachek, though. His coaching abomination resulted in the Leafs drafting Mitch Marner and acquiring Mike Babcock. So, thanks for that.
#4. Dan Maloney
Maloney was a great player, but that unfortunately didn’t transition to coaching.
Don’t worry, Dan, it didn’t work out for Wayne Gretzky either.
From 1970-1982, players around the NHL did not want to mess with Maloney. Arguably one of the greatest fighters in NHL, Maloney could go toe-to-toe with anyone.
If you want to watch some old-school hockey, just search ‘Don Maloney Fight’ into YouTube and you’ll see plenty of beauties. The man could not only throw a huge right, but he could take a punch better than anyone.
After his playing days were over, the Leafs hired Maloney to become an assistant coach, and two years later he was the boss behind the bench.
When he took over as head coach in 1984, the Toronto Maple Leafs had some talent up-front with Rick Vaive, Gary Leeman, Borje Salming and John Anderson but their goaltending was awful.
Their goaltenders had a combined 4.51 GAA in his only two seasons as Leafs head coach, so he had trouble winning games.
His goaltender may not have given him much to work with, but in Leafs history, Maloney has the worst winning percentage for any coach who coached a full season with an overall .328 winning percentage.
With only 45 wins in 160 total games coaches, Maloney has to go down as one of the worst coaches in Leafs history.
#3. Ron Wilson
Wilson is seventh all-time among Leafs coaches for wins, so why would he make this list?
Well for one, the win total is inflated because there were no more ties. The vast majority of Wilson’s competition coached in times when there were.
Let’s look back at an interview by Brian Burke on March 3, 2012 when he fired Wilson in the middle of his fourth season behind the bench.
“It became obvious to me in the last week that we needed to make a coaching change if we wanted to try to salvage this season… Two and a half weeks ago we were in the eighth spot, comfortable… I don’t know — I’ve never had this before. I’ve never had a team fall off a cliff like this before in my life. I’ve had dips, I’ve had slumps, I’ve had rough patches. But this is akin to an 18-wheeler going right off a cliff. I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know. I’ve never experienced this.”
Ouch.
An ’18-wheeler going right off a cliff’ is tough to come back from and it makes sense that Wilson has yet to coach another NHL game anywhere since.
Although Wilson is seventh in wins for Leafs coaches, he’s also seventh in losses for Leafs coaches all-time.
In four seasons, he never made the playoffs and the team was mediocre at best.
Ron Wilson was a crusty old grump with a terrible attitude. He may have been successful in the past, but his style did not work in the modern era where communication was important and players expected to be treated with dignity.
#2. John Brophy
Brophy’s time in Toronto did not go well.
In two and a half seasons, Brophy finished with a 64-111-18 record. That winning percentage is third worst of all-time in Leafs history, but the craziest part of all this is that he made the playoffs in both years he coached.
After finishing 10 games below .500 in the 1986-87 season, the Leafs somehow made the playoffs, and actually won a round.
In the following season, the Leafs finished 21-49-10 and still made the playoffs! Somehow the Minnesota North Stars were worse than the Leafs that year, so they got to play playoff hockey.
In today’s NHL, that record would result in 50 points for the season, which would normally put them 45 points back of a playoff spot, but back in 1988, no matter how bad you were, you had a chance at the playoffs.
So, don’t let the playoff appearances fool you. Brophy was not a good coach and the team was absolutely terrible under his lead.
Leafs management finally realized this as well, that 33 games into the 1988-89 season, the team fired him.
After his time in Toronto, Brophy went onto become a successful ECHL coach but would never coach in the NHL ever again.
#1. Randy Carlyle
Although Carlyle was with the Toronto Maple Leafs for four seasons, he technically only coached one full 82-game season with the team.
With an NHL Lockout shortening one season, and then being hired and fired mid-way through two other seasons, the 2013-14 season was the only year we saw a full sample size of Carlyle and it wasn’t pretty.
If you were to look at the win-loss record for the 13-14 season, you wouldn’t think much of it. It seemed like another season where the Leafs narrowly missed the playoffs, giving fans hope that “there’s always next year.”
However, that’s not what happened.
Sitting in a playoff spot with 14 games left, the Leafs went 2-12 to miss the playoffs. It was one of the most pathetic stretches of hockey the team has ever played and sent the Toronto Maple Leafs into a rebuild.
Carlyle miraculously kept his job after that, albeit for only 40 more games.
During his time behind the bench, the Leafs were in the bottom-five for goals against in three of his four seasons, and getting out-shot every night was his bread-and-butter.
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The only thanks Leafs fans have for Carlyle is that his incapability to coach helped Leafs management realize they needed to hit the reset button, which resulted in a rebuild.