Today, Randy Carlyle finds himself as the ex-coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, fired because according to Senior Vice President and General Manager Dave Nonis, the team played “inconsistently”.
In fact, they played like the remnant of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund-Brian Burke team.
I used to have Toronto Maple Leaf season tickets during the ownership of Harold Ballad when the Leafs used to ice bad teams that sometimes made the playoffs and sometimes did not.
I and many (if not most) Leaf fans believed that could not be a worse professional sports owner than Ballard, who meddled in team affairs, hired the wrong management, the wrong coaches, drafted the wrong players and then mismanaged them so that they were ruined. Most fans and media believed that the team would only get better once Ballard died or the team was sold.
But somehow the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund exceeded Ballard and ran the team into the ground. Their record is actually worse than Ballard: In all the years of ownership, not one playoff game.
It takes time to recover from such carnage. The new ownership of MLSE came in and hired Brendan Shanahan to run things with Nonis as his assistant and up-front man. Carlyle is simply the last coach from the Teachers’ regime.
Nor was he the main coach during the Teachers’ regime. That was Ron Wilson who was given chance after chance to improve the Leafs but never even made the playoffs. Carlyle was the best coach to be hired when the Teachers ran out of excuses for keeping Wilson.
Carlyle inherited the mess the Teachers built. The highest forward draft choice that is currently iced by the Leafs that the Teachers drafted is the wonderful Nazem Kadri who has an inspiring 11 goals. There is also bust David Clarkson who has 9.
Where exactly does Maple Leaf ownership and management expect this team to be? In my opinion Carlyle has taken them exactly where they are supposed to be with such a roster; neither way up at the top nor down in the bottom, but somewhere in the middle struggling to make the playoffs, sometimes in and sometimes out. This line-up is no better than that.
Where are the superstars like Tavares in Long Island, Crosby in Pittsburgh, and Toews in Chicago? Where is the super goalie like Quick in Los Angeles?
Carlyle has done the best he can with such a roster. Of course this team plays inconsistently. It was built that way. That’s not Carlyle’s fault. It can take years to clear up the mess a bad ownership leaves behind. When the new regime took over from Ballard, in all their years of ownership, they never made the Stanley Cup Finals before the Teachers took over. They iced respectable, contending teams but that was it. No champion.
Carlyle is a good coach who has won a Stanley Cup with the Anaheim Ducks. Not many of the current coaches in the NHL can put that on their resume. In my opinion, he got the most out of what he was given by the Leafs. He was the obvious target, the obvious scapegoat once Shanahan was hired.
In these circumstances, his successor is unlikely to do better and more likely will do worse. The Leafs currently have a winning record and a playoff spot. When Ottawa fired coach Paul MacLean, so did the Senators who have now dropped out of the playoffs. Leaf ownership and management are taking a real risk here.
Carlyle is paying the price not for his own mistakes but for a regime that ran the Leafs into the ground and did not care about team performance but only profits. He joins MacLean, Dallas Eakins, and Peter DeBoer on the sidelines. Hopefully by the start of the next NHL season, none of them will be unemployed but be behind the bench of some other NHL team.
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Main Photo by Joel Auerbach/Getty Images
