Sheldon Keefe, your time is up.
Bruce Boudreau, your timing is finally right.
This Maple Leafs team clearly needs a jolt, and it’s time to determine whether a change behind the bench could be that something.
It doesn’t have to be Boudreau. There are other experienced coaches available, like Barry Trotz. Joel Quenneville will eventually be forgiven and hired by someone if he still yearns to coach.
But Boudreau is a veteran coach with a reputation as a quick turnaround artist. Moreover, Boudreau was born in Toronto, grew up here, starred for the junior Marlboros and repeatedly tried, unsuccessfully, to become a regular for his hometown Maple Leafs. He knows this market inside and out. He’s proven time and time again his talent lies in getting underachieving teams to play better in the short term.
He wasn’t available back in October when the Leafs got off to a 4-4-2 start and many were calling for Keefe’s head. It was far too early to make a coaching move then, and Keefe did right the ship, moving the Leafs into the top five of the NHL for most of the season.
But now there are 28 games left, the mood towards this team is shifting and Boudreau is available. So a few things have changed since October.
For a team that seems so stoic in the face of victory or defeat, a team that sometimes seems more driven by the nightly mood of its best players more than team excellence, bringing in the affable, quotable and often potty-mouthed Boudreau might inject some much needed passion into a season that has so much of the time felt like an 82-game trudge to an inevitable first round meeting with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Keefe’s comments after Saturday night’s loss to Columbus, the worst team in the league, sounded a little like a coach feeling defeated.
“I can’t do the work for them,” he said after the 4-3 defeat to a team the Leafs had handled with relative ease the night before in Ohio.
The Leafs have now won only five of 13 games this season against the four worst teams in the league. Keefe said he told his players after a second period in which the Blue Jackets scored three times that it was up to them to understand the value of the two points.
“I told them you’ve got to make a decision how important this is,” said Keefe.
They decided it wasn’t that important. But it wasn’t just this game. The Leafs lost twice to the first-place Bruins in three weeks. They lost on the road against weak Montreal after blowing a 2-0 lead. They got creamed at home by a bad Ottawa team, and beaten in Detroit by another non-playoff squad.
At this point, there is little convincing evidence, aside from improved defensive metrics, that this team is any better than last year’s team that lost in seven games in the first round to Tampa.
This season, several players are having outstanding years, notably Mitch Marner and William Nylander. Ilya Samsonov has been better than expected in goal. When Auston Matthews has been healthy, he’s been very good. John Tavares is on pace for 35 goals. Morgan Rielly has bounced back from a mid-season knee injury.
So it’s not like the team’s best players are all struggling and dragging down the coach. Since hiring Keefe on Nov. 20, 2019, GM Kyle Dubas has overhauled the defence, replaced the goalies and continually changed the mix of the bottom six forwards. The only things Dubas hasn’t done over the past 3 ½ years is touch his core of four elite forwards or replace Keefe. There are many who wonder if that would happen under any circumstances, given their close relationship.
There has to be deep concern in the offices of president Brendan Shanahan and Dubas that not only are the Leafs likely to lose again to Tampa, they might forfeit home-ice advantage down the stretch after holding second place in the Atlantic for several months.
Hiring Boudreau now would be simple and cheap, preferable to giving up more draft picks and prospects in that endless search for that one player who might come in and make a crucial difference. Signing collegian Matthew Knies could provide an extra body who might help.
The beauty of the 68-year-old Boudreau is that he could be a short-term fix. If it works and the team gets by the Bolts, then you consider a longer contract. If the Leafs fall again in the first round, there’s a decent chance Dubas gets pink-slipped and the new GM could then pick his own coach.
Ever since Boudreau, a successful minor league coach, finally got his first NHL head coaching assignment in Washington back in 2007, there’s been this sense that, like Pat Quinn, there would be some poetry in him getting a chance to coach the Leafs. But when Boudreau was available, they weren’t looking for a coach. When they were, he was tied up elsewhere.
Last season the Canucks were 8-15-2 when Boudreau replaced Travis Green, and then went 32-15-10 (.649) the rest of the way, missing the playoffs by two points. When the team started this season winless in its first seven, Boudreau was doomed.
Last summer, 10 NHL clubs made coaching changes. Three of the new coaches — Boston’s Jim Montgomery, Dallas’s Pete DeBoer and Bruce Cassidy of the Vegas Golden Knights — have their teams in first place. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
On five occasions this century, a coaching change has taken a team over the top and right to the Stanley Cup. It happened when Larry Robinson replaced Robbie Ftorek with first-place New Jersey in 1999-2000, Dan Bylsma replaced Michel Therrien with Pittsburgh in 2009 and Darryl Sutter took over from Terry Murray in the 2011-12 season. It also happened again with the Penguins in 2015-16 when Mike Sullivan replaced Mike Johnston, and once more in the 2018-19 season in St. Louis after Craig Berube replaced Mike Yeo.
It’s a card a good team has at its disposal to play at the right time. Now is the right time for the Leafs.
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