Jan 7, 2015
Carlyle's firing was easy; the Leafs' other problems - not so much
Maybe the firing of Randy Carlyle will be the magic bullet that sends the Toronto Maple Leafs in the right direction. And what happened Tuesday was predictable and simple. But as TSN's Dave Naylor writes, the things that are necessary to reverse the direction of this Leaf team are going to be much harder to figure out.
By Dave Naylor
Maybe the firing of Randy Carlyle will be the magic bullet that sends the Toronto Maple Leafs in the right direction.
Although it's hard to believe that Leaf management really believes that's the case.
They not only did the easy thing on Tuesday morning, they did essentially the only thing they could at this point with a team that was looking every bit as flawed as the one that had collapsed in various forms over the past three seasons.
Everyone could see a fourth collapse on the way and, well, you know that line about the definition of insanity - right?
At least now if that occurs, no one will be able to say the Leafs did nothing and no one can hang it on the coach.
It should be noted that Randy Carlyle is the fourth Maple Leaf coach in a row to have reached at least a Stanley Cup Final behind the bench of a previous team, following Ron Wilson, Paul Maurice and Pat Quinn. The only one of those who got close with the Leafs was Quinn, but that was during an era when the Leafs could paper over their team-building mistakes with money.
So is coaching really the issue with this organization? Or is it far beyond that?
The fact is that Randy Carlyle is symptomatic of a much larger dysfunction in Leafland.
He was left over from the Brian Burke era, brought in to give the Leafs a more physical dimension than they had under Ron Wilson.
But that school of thinking held less weight once Burke was gone. And by the time Brendan Shanahan arrived it had completely evaporated, which is why the Leafs have gone from more of the most fight-prone teams in the NHL to one of the least.
Leaf management took away Carlyle's assistants last spring, and then tried to gloss over what sure looked like a vote of non-confidence in their head coach by tacking a year onto his contract.
It looked like a flawed move at the time and it looks even worse today.
Carlyle was better at controlling his emotions in public than Ron Wilson had been during his time as coach of the Leafs, but by Saturday in Winnipeg he'd pretty much arrived at the same spot - frustrated and at a loss to how to get this group of players to play a style conducive to cutting down the opposition's scoring chances.
And so Shanahan and/or GM Dave Nonis arrived at the exact same spot Burke had with Wilson neither three years earlier, with the exact same issues facing this team.
Firing a coach is like flicking a switch. Changing a roster laden with long term contracts is like trying to chisel concrete - it's just not easy.
What happened Tuesday was predictable and simple. But the things that are necessary to reverse the direction of this Leaf team are going to be much harder to figure out.