Toronto Maple Leafs: There Should Be No Chance of Coaching Change

Any suggestion of the Toronto Maple Leafs ousting Sheldon Keefe as head coach is a rather foolish ‘hot take’.

It’s incredibly easy to build a narrative that the Toronto Maple Leafs are a team in trouble with a coach on the proverbial hot seat.

However, that narrative fails to look at a few simple facts: the Leafs were 4th overall last season, they played well enough to move on in the playoffs, and they could have started the season 4-0 if Auston Matthews or their power-play were scoring.

Since both those things are pretty much guaranteed to start happening, it’s a little early to start with the coaching nonsense.

Toronto Maple Leafs Need To Stay The Course

Perhaps it’s a nice narrative or an easy suggestion to throw out there that Sheldon Keefe has lost the room, the players don’t respect him or that he can’t get it done. However, there is no evidence to back that up.

Unfortunately, losing to what could end up being a historically bad team is always going to cause frustration among the fanbase.

Replacing Sheldon Keefe after just four games would do very little to improve the Toronto Maple Leafs fortunes, no matter the frustration level. Here is a head coach with a 118-52-19 coaching record through 189 games as the team’s head coach.

People will doubtlessly point to playoff series failings as another reason to move Sheldon Keefe on, but again it’s hard to justify this when he literally has had one legitimate playoff series as coach.

It’s very hard to judge his coaching in the COVID-impacted series, because while the Toronto Maple Leafs did indeed fail to meet expectations in a huge way; those seasons in general probably deserve an asterisk.

The most popular idea right now is to replace Sheldon Keefe with Barry Trotz. Now assuming you want to hold playoff series losses over Keefe; the same must be applied to Trotz.

Barry Trotz lost in the first round five times, before he finally led the Nashville Predators to a series win. Simply put, getting past the first round is not easy.

Granted, Trotz then eventually led the Washington Capitals to a Stanley Cup, albeit one that saw them blocked at the second round for three seasons before achieving their ultimate goal.

However, just because he happens to be the biggest name free agent coach on the market; he is immediately attached to the Toronto Maple Leafs as some kind of saviour.

Last time this team did that and hedged all their bets on a coach was with Mike Babcock and we all remember how that turned out.

What the Toronto Maple Leafs need to do right now is allow the team a chance to pause, realise that they need to up their standards against the league’s lesser teams, and make sure they finish up October as a winning month.

That means the coach needs to be given runway to get on with his job, though perhaps needs to look at a few different line combinations as the month goes on.

Replacing Sheldon Keefe with Barry Trotz right now would not fix this Toronto Maple Leafs team.

In fact, he could go a long way to breaking what chemistry has been built; new coaches mean change and if there’s one thing all people, hockey players included, don’t enjoy – it’s change.

Stick with what we know for now; the wins will come.