Turns out Randy Carlyle wasn’t a Dead Coach Talking in the last few weeks of the just past Toronto Maple Leafs’ season.
He was just whistling by his grave.
He’s alive and well, with a two-year extension to helm the Leafs even though they went 2-12 down their end of season meltdown, missing the playoffs for the eighth time in the last nine seasons. Almost nobody saw this coming with new prez of hockey ops Brendan Shanahan coming in and the owners head honcho, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment’s Tim Leiweke preaching a just win, baby accountability of performance.
Instead, Carlyle, who had one year left on his current deal after replacing Ron Wilson, is returning and they have fired the three assistant coaches Scott Gordon, Greg Cronin and Carlyle’s best friend Dave Farrish from their playing days and coaching together in Anaheim. They did not fire goalie coach Rick St. Croix, who replaced Francois Allaire this past season. He had a good relationship with their No. 1 goalie Jonathan Bernier, so they’re not going to blow that up.
Just when we figured former Nashville coach Barry Trotz had the inside track at what we thought would be the vacant Leafs’ head-coaching job, Carlyle is not only retained, but he theoretically has two years to turn this around. That, of course, could go out the window if the Leafs, say, start 2-12 again with their porous team defence, but Toronto usually starts well, then fades. Whatever, Carlyle’s worker bees are taking the fall, even though GM Dave Nonis says “I don’t blame the assistant coaches for what went wrong.”
“Firing all the assistants? That doesn’t happen very often,” said one NHL team executive.
So with Carlyle staying, that means there’s still four coaching openings–Florida, Washington, Vancouver and Carolina. The Preds replaced Trotz with Peter Laviolette a few days ago.
Carlyle conceded the last month was an agonizing time, with the general feeling being he was out, that the Leafs needed a new coach. Most people thought there would be Carlyle Gone presser when the NBA Raptors season ended. Instead, it’s a Carlyle Stays conference call with Randy and Nonis
“It was a trying time and there were a lot of discussions on an analysis-basis on what went wrong and where we need to improve,” admitted Carlyle. ” “The one thing that stuck out was there was a level of compete and a level of success for a certain period of time, then we couldn’t get the team back on the rails. That confused us because we feel this team can grow to a higher level. We have to push for more from the individuals.”
While many fans in Leaf Nation wanted a new voice behind the bench, Nonis didn’t see it that way in consultation with Shanahan. He’s aware that the fan base was screaming for change but he’d rather deal in statistics than optics. Carlyle is a good coach–he won a Cup in Anaheim in 2007, he’s won 100 more games than he’s lost in his NHL coaching career–but there was a feeling the players had turned a deaf ear to him after the Olympic break when things crumbled. He couldn’t stem the tide of losses and their style of play was high octane but fraught with mistakes, with way too much pressure on Bernier and backup James Reimer, who could be traded this summer. They have little sandpaper on the back-end and were routinely outshot in games.
“Brendan and I conducted a thorough review over the last couple of weeks and we made the decision that Randy was the right coach for this team,” said Nonis. “He has done a lot of good things for us and we expect he’ll continue to do that with some new assistants and put us back in the post-season.”
“This is the first step towards reshaping the team and the first and probably most important decision we’ll make this off-season.”
Carlyle sees how other teams are playing and doesn’t feel there has to be radical change on his team. They can skate, they can score for sure. They can’t defend, though, and they get pushed around in their end. That has to be improved, greatly. “It’s a skating, physical game and we have a skating hockey club. We have to be aggressive on the puck,” said Carlyle.
Nonis says “team toughness” wins in today’s game.
But the Leafs as they are currently constructed aren’t terribly tough to play against.
