The Toronto Maple Leafs entered the season with the fourth best odds to win the Stanley Cup, but after 23 games they’ve dropped all the way down to 14th on the list, they’re one game under .500, and have a brand new head coach set to make his NHL coaching debut on Thursday night in Arizona.
Brendan Shanahan spoke to the media on Wednesday afternoon shortly after the news broke that the team had fired Mike Babcock and replaced him with Sheldon Keefe, and on Thursday it was general manager Kyle Dubas who spoke to the media and made all the rounds, which included a call into TSN’s OverDrive.
The OverDrive guys didn’t waste much time getting to the question every Leafs fan has been wondering and that’s why they decided to bring Babcock back for these 23 games instead of moving on in the offseason.
Bryan Hayes: Why did you bring Babcock back for these 23 games?
Kyle Dubas: I think at the end of the season, and it will likely be the same with Sheldon [Keefe] and has been in the years I worked with him and worked with Mike [Babcock], you get to the end of the season and you look back and evaluate where you’re at, evaluate the changes you want to make, and I totally understand the question and why people are befuddled by the fact that we could have done it then and tried to go through 23 games and then do it. And I understand it doesn’t put the team or Sheldon into a good spot, but I think that the reality is that I really wanted it to work with Mike and to go through a summer and try to find a way to push our team to the next level. And at the same time just because we had done that and sensed that things weren’t going to go the way we wanted that it wouldn’t have been right to just keep rolling along as we were and that’s why we felt we need to make a change.
A lot of fans aren’t happy with the timing at all, as they feel the team missed the chance for the perfect fresh start and are now throwing a first-time NHL coach into the fire to turn around a team in one of the largest hockey markets in the world, but only time will tell if it was the right move or not.
