Current Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Craig Berube is the perfect man for the job right now.
If you've watched the first month of the Toronto Maple Leafs season, you'd notice a ton of inconsistency. The team is once again near the top of the league in goals for, but they're unfortunately also near the league lead in goals against.
Toronto is currently averaging 3.71 goals for, but is avearging 3.57 goal against, which makes their 8-5-1 record appropriate. They're scoring more goals than they allow which would suggest that they should win more games than they lose which is good, but it's a concerning start, especially after last year.
During the 2024-25 season, the Leafs finished with a 2.79 goals against average and 3.29 goals for average, so although they're scoring at a worse clip year over year, allowing 0.78 more goals per game is a scary thought.
You could point towards the coach and say that he's the reason why this team is allowing more goals per game and is scoring less goals per game but that wouldn't really be fair. In my opinion, there are two reasons why this true.
Leafs would be crazy to fire Berube
Firstly, the team isn't scoring as much because they no longer have Mitch Marner. If you take a 27 goal and 102 point player out of the line-up and replace him Martias Maccelli or Bobby McMann, you're not going to be as succesful offensively. Although Auston Matthews and William Nylander have been picking things up lately, losing Marner has had a huge effect on this team thus far.
As of the defensive issues, it boils down to goaltending, but specifically Anthony Stolarz. It's not like Stolarz has been terrible this year, but he's definitely been below average and much worse than he was last year. The defense is essentially the exact same from the previous year so you can't blame them, but instead can look to Stolarz' performance as the reason why this team isn't as good as we thought.
For example, Stolarz had a 2.15 GAA and .926 SV% last year but only has a .895 SV% and 3.11 GAA in 11 games. Not only that, but he's started 78 percent of the Leafs games thus far, which is a much higher clip than he's used to. Without Joseph Woll, Stolarz has been looked at as "the guy" which isn't quite fair to him either, as he's never had that big of a workload.
Stolarz has never started more than 40 percent of an NHL season before (33 games), so he's already at one-third of the total amount he's used to playing from October-April and it's only November.
So although you can point to Berube as the issue, I don't think this team is bad as you'd think, or he's coaching that bad. All this team really needs is for Joseph Woll to come back healthy so that Stolarz/Woll can play as a tandem and for the team to find another top-six winger. If those two things come into fruition, this team can compete with anyone.