It is not so cut and dried, trying to determine what to do with head coach Sheldon Keefe.
The screamers — and even some non-screamers demanding change — want him fired immediately after another incomplete playoff season for the Maple Leafs. On the one hand, replacing Keefe is an obvious and necessary move. On the other, it may make no sense at all.
It depends on how you choose to view the team, the coach, what he’s accomplished and hasn’t accomplished, in more than an emotional way. I’ve gone back and forth on what the Leafs should do with Keefe and find myself conflicted after this seven-game overtime defeat to the Boston Bruins in Round 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Keefe may have never coached better — or prepared his team more thoroughly — than he did for Games 5, 6 and 7 of the series with the Bruins. The Leafs began the round without star forward William Nylander. They lost Auston Matthews in the middle of the series for seven periods, but he did return for Game 7 at less than 100%. They never had the services of the emerging Bobby McMann and, just when Joseph Woll took over as the playoff goaltender du jour, he got hurt and was unable to play the final game.
That’s a lot for a coach to deal with — a lineup in disarray, a rag-tag defence, and some high-priced help not performing to their capabilities as well. Yet the Leafs wound up as the better team on the ice in the final three games of the series, winning two of them.
That’s a credit to the players and to the coaching staff. Al Arbour once told me that playoff coaching was more about what you did between games than what you did during them.
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But what wasn’t terrific during games was how the Leafs began the series, looking like the second-best team, too uninvolved emotionally, too flat to start games, unable to win puck battles, outmanned and outperformed on special teams. Some of that has to be on the coach.
But firing Keefe today or tomorrow might be dismissing a bench boss after he coached the three greatest games of his life. That’s the pendulum here. A see-saw of logic and emotions in a city crying out for hockey change. You can make a case to fire Keefe and make a case to keep him — and both cases could be reasonably argued.
Now you have seven games to look back upon, and almost five full seasons coaching the Maple Leafs to digest before any decision should be made. The first half of the series was an easy fire-the-coach narrative. The second half was not. In fact, as the Leafs played air-tight team defence in Games 5, 6 and 7, giving up three regulation goals in three games, that was a lot about coaching.
That was coaching with a defence led by Jake McCabe of all people and with his partner, Simon Benoit, having such a strong series. Benoit, Ilya Lyubushkin, Joel Edmundson, Timothy Liljegren are all bottom-pairing NHL defencemen under normal circumstances. Protecting them — that’s a term Joel Quenneville used to use about his third pair on defence — was an absolute strength of the Leafs in the playoffs.
Again, a lot of that comes back to coaching and game circumstances. The much-maligned Toronto defence played well enough to win the series, all but shutting down the house in front of the Leafs goal through the final three games.
All of that seemed to work — until overtime in Game 7.
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A trio of individual mistakes were made before David Pastrnak scored the series-winning goal. Mitch Marner, in the neutral zone, didn’t support his defenceman, Morgan Rielly, by slowing down Pastrnak, as was his responsibility. Rielly wasn’t prepared for the speed with which Pastrnak came at him, and didn’t react quickly enough to the Boston forward. And goalie Ilya Samsonov, who had a chance to play the loose bounce off the boards, chose to stay deep in his goal instead.
That was it, game over, series over. Just like that. The winning goal had nothing to do with coaching and everything to do with execution on the ice.
In today’s NHL, Rod Brind’Amour is thought to be the hottest coaching commodity in hockey. Should he go to free agency, which is possible with semi-crazy ownership in Carolina, there would be a lineup of teams wanting to throw millions at him to be their next coach.
There would not be a similar lineup for an available Keefe.
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And yet, with a deeper defensive roster in Carolina, Brind’Amour’s career winning percentage is .664. Keefe’s career winning percentage in Toronto is a slightly better at .665, the third-best numbers in NHL history. Those are regular-season numbers, it should be emphasized.
His playoff numbers — a .432 winning percentage — mirror the lack of success of his team. Brind’Amour’s playoff numbers are .529.
During this past season, the Leafs were the highest-scoring team in the Eastern Conference, but in the playoffs, they were the lowest-scoring team — with just 12 goals in seven games against Boston. Is that coaching? Is that a lack of a power play? Is it a combination of coaching and players who can’t raise their games to the intensity necessary to succeed in post-season hockey?
At the same time, the Leafs went from 21st in the league in goals-against to ninth-best in the playoffs. In seven games against the Bruins, Toronto outscored Boston 11-10 at even strength, not counting the empty-net goals involved.
Sheldon Keefe doesn’t have a made-for-public personality, doesn’t have the It Factor some coaches seem to have naturally. But what he does, works. Has he run the course here? Maybe.
But in a market starving for change — demanding change — finding someone better at the job than Keefe may be just another challenge of the perpetually challenged Maple Leafs.
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