Toronto Maple Leafs: Bruce Boudreau Rumours Make No Sense

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a really great coach in Sheldon Keefe.

Say what you want about the way the Toronto Maple Leafs finished the season, but coaching appears to be the least of their worries.

Keefe came about 23 games into the season, and the team immediately responded to what he was selling.  The Leafs were out of the playoffs, a long shot to make them, and things were looking bleak.

Keefe came in and the team proceeded to win over 70% of the games for the rest of the season where Keefe coached and Morgan Rielly played.   Accounting for bad goaltending, this number could have been in the low 80s.

And the Leafs didn’t just get a bump from a new coach: they completely revamped their playing style and system.  The results were stunning at first but tapered off as the team was heavily injured.

All in all, it was a promising start to Keefe’s coaching career.

So why bring in a guy regularly touted as the Best Coach in the NHL as his assistant?

Say No to Boudreau

If you’ve ever heard Boudreau do a radio spot, you know that he’s just about the coolest guy in the NHL.  Charismatic, funny, and intelligent, Boudreau is the total package.  If He had Nylander’s hair, I’d leave my wife for him – that’s how cool he is.

Bring Boudreau to the Leafs would be one of the greatest things ever – except for the fact that the Leafs already have a really good coach.

While Boudreau and Keefe may be the kind of rare personalities who could deal with such a situation, it still seems unnecessarily risky to undermine your new coach by putting him in charge of the guy who is probably his idol.

Boudreau is the kind of coach who everyone likes, because he’s such a great guy and his teams always have success.  There is no doubt that if the Toronto Maple Leafs needed a new coach, he’d be the guy you’d want.

But how can you put a rookie in charge of a hall of famer without making it awkward?  How can you hire the best coach in the NHL in the last decade to work below a rookie, without completely  undermining the head coach?

And what about the media?

Boudreau would immediately take the title of Coach in Waiting, and every time the Leafs went on a bad run, there would be rumours about making the switch.

I am sure the difference between having Boudreau and having me as an assistant coach would be huge.  But compared to anyone else who could reasonably be hired to be assistant coach, how much actual value is Boudreau bringing above and beyond whoever else they’d hire?

Considering hockey is a sport where the best player is only worth 4 or 5 wins  above a random AHL replacement player over 82 games, its hard to imagine an assistant coach making a huge difference.

For such a marginal gain, is it worth undermining Sheldon Keefe?

I doubt it.