The only real surprise is that he made it all the way to 2015.
The same fundamental flaws haunted this Leaf roster despite a fleeting glimpse of progress in the first 10-15 games of the season, when the Leafs were actually playing some even games in terms of shots and possession share. That quickly took a return to the depressingly familiar:
Leafs possession game is trending in the wrong direction. Play is starting to reek of 2013. pic.twitter.com/HtwMHD1Rcy
— Dom Jr. Galamini (@MimicoHero) December 29, 2014
You have to figure players like Carter Ashton and Greg McKegg (the most recent examples among many others) getting inserted into the lineup only to play nothing minutes was a significant part of this, because not only were the results not there, but management could not even evaluate some of its young assets properly moving forward under the former coach’s rule. That is when a bad coach gets truly malignant, and it seems management tried to force ideas like “changing the blackhole first line” and “playing a 4th line more” on Carlyle and he began tuning them out.
I had heard since before Christmas that the Leafs were "not on the same page." I understood that to mean Carlyle wasn't listening, frankly.
— James Mirtle (@mirtle) January 6, 2015
Then, he made these remarks in what constitute a parting shot at management if I’d ever seen one:
“You don’t always have the luxury to say that you’d like this player or that player or this type of player. That’s not the way it works. How it works is you have an organization that provides you with players, and our job, as we’ve said all along, is just to coach ’em up.”
– Randy Carlyle, after another embarrassing loss to the Winnipeg Jets.
Get rid of Carlyle first, evaluate for a bit, and then shakeup the core as you see fit, Shanny.
— Alec Brownscombe (@MapleLeafsHS) December 30, 2014
The most important part is that something tangible changes from the Carlyle regime so that the evaluative process holds some sort of real benefit. Practice lines are practice lines, but hopefully Spott and Horachek are more receptive to some of management’s ideas than to carry on with this kind of lineup:
#leafs lines. JVR-Bozak-Kessel, Winnik-Kadri-Santorelli, Komarov-Smith-Clarkson, Booth-McKegg-Panik-Ashton. #TMLtalk
— David Alter (@dalter) January 6, 2015
Let’s get one thing clear: This is just the beginning of a long and ugly process to get this roster turned around. But at least now we can spend some time evaluating post-Carlyle, a process that should’ve begun 40 games ago but for whatever reason didn’t (Shanahan didn’t like the other options at the time, Carlyle expressed a willingness to change and not-so-suprisingly didn’t, etc.). For the prime-aged core of this team, the time between now and the deadline and summer becomes their last chance to prove there’s something worth keeping together here, or at the very least, that they’re individually a part of the solution going forward.
Which is to say the obvious — The problems run deeper than Carlyle. Daniel Winnik was the latest to come into this Leaf team from a winning organization and be a little shocked at some of the habits on this team and generally how it plays hockey.
Daniel Winnik observed recently that the structured game, which has eluded the Leafs so often, is not always “fun” to play, but necessary for team success. He noted Monday how the club tends to stray from that type of game and “think ‘hey we can play some run and gun right now’. It’s tough to stick to a structured system when that’s happening.”
Winnik agreed that part of the challenge lied in convincing the team’s skilled players to rein in that skill from time to time in favour of a better team game. Fewer risky plays, say, at the offensive blue line thus resulting in fewer turnovers and less chances for the opponent in transition.
“When you’ve got guys who are as skilled as they are, it’s tough to hold them back,” Winnik said. “It’s like reining in a thoroughbred and telling them to not go as fast as they can.”
“We’ve gotten better at it throughout the year and then we’ve reverted back to old ways sometimes. I don’t know what it’s going to take to stick to robotics a bit, but I think it’ll slowly happen.”
“I think it’s just commitment, really. It’s tough to do.”
This is by no means an easy team to coach. When they’re scoring for fun they can be convincing, but the team often succeeds despite itself and wins for the wrong reasons. I never envied Carlyle, who tried to preach ‘possession, possession, possession’ only to have the team get red-hot as their numbers took a nosedive and bad habits seeped back into the team’s game. It’s a tough sell for a coach to inform a bunch of professional athletes they’re the hottest team in the League but that they’re doing it all wrong. Without fail, this team’s win streaks have been followed by big losing streaks for that reason. Unlike last season (“we don’t criticize wins,” “internal scoring chance numbers say we’re not getting outplayed,” and so on), Carlyle, for his part, never bought into the hype of their latest win streak. In that respect it’s true he did change, but words are cheap and where it mattered it was a story of the same old, same old.
From here, it looks like management will consider its options while Peter Horachek and Steve Spott run the bench. Horachek does have the NHL head coaching experience, an interim stint with Florida in relief of Kevin Dineen. He had some success in getting the Panthers’ possession game turned around, but bad goaltending, injuries and a roster generally short on talent saw him finish up with a 26-36-4 record in 66 games. Most interesting will be if they are more receptive to breaking the Carlyle mould, because it was pretty clear whatever it was Kyle Dubas and his new analytics team were doing was amounting to little more than a coffee-stained pile of unread reports on Carlyle’s desk.
The wasted 40 games look like a bit of a blackmark on Brendan Shanahan’s early Presidential record now, but it could end up looking like the smarter more patient move in time. There could be some good-looking options/potentialities in Todd McLellan (who the Leafs were reportedly waiting to see if he would be brought back in San Jose over the summer), Ken Hitchcock (like McLellan, availability will likely depend on St. Louis’ post-season success), Mike Babcock (we all know the story there) and Peter Deboer (available now) among others come the Spring.
The problems here are pretty overwhelming and a lot of this is unlikely to change until there’s some significant player overhaul/core alterations, but, to those left unconvinced after last season, there was no disputing anymore that this was the necessary first step forward. Onward, and hopefully one day, upward.
