TORONTO – To understand why Mike Babcock called an abrupt end to practice after 24 minutes and plenty of skating here on Friday you must first zoom out slightly.
It hasn’t been a particularly challenging week for his Toronto Maple Leafs, not by NHL standards.
They lost Saturday in Ottawa and had a moderate-intensity practice on Sunday. There was an optional morning skate before Monday’s win over Los Angeles – the first one granted this season – and a day off Tuesday. The players held their annual Halloween party that night.
Then it was practice Wednesday and a dud of an effort in Thursday’s 6-3 loss to Carolina.
In Babcock’s world, that can’t happen. Unacceptable. He consulted with the sports science team on Friday morning to see how hard he could skate the players with a difficult schedule to come and ordered everyone off the ice the second he’d seen enough.
“I didn’t want anybody out their wasting any energy fooling around,” said Babcock, who even collected the pucks with assistant coach D.J. Smith afterwards. “I want it at game time.”
This was a teaching moment as much for observers as the players themselves. It’s easy to point to Toronto’s favourable shot metrics and 7-3-0 record and 43 goals scored and assume everything’s going to be all right.
However, this was the first time Babcock spelled out in plain language that he expects his team to function at the level of a Stanley Cup contender. The future is now. The bar has been raised.
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And if you read between the lines, he believes they might be 9-1-0 if they hadn’t got too satisfied with themselves a couple times this season.
“If you go back, we beat Chicago before we lost to New Jersey [on Oct. 11] and everybody was talking about it’s a good team, and a good win, and what happened to us? We weren’t ready to play the next day,” said Babcock. “Then we beat L.A. [on Monday] and it was supposed to be a good team, they hadn’t lost this year, what happened to us?
“So the level of commitment to doing it right every single day for a championship team is that: You’ve got to do it every single day and you’ve got to do it at practice and you’ve got to do it when you don’t feel good and you’ve got to do it when you travel and you’ve got to do it when you’re tired.
“You just do it every single day and that becomes the norm and the expectation. That’s what we have to set here.”
It certainly places a fine point on Saturday’s visit by the Philadelphia Flyers, when they’ll likely play Josh Leivo in favour of the injured James van Riemsdyk and feature tweaks on three forward lines.
The Leafs embark on a tough trip through California and St. Louis next week, so it is over this coming stretch where we’ll get a sense if they’re ready to go beyond good and be great. There was no telling what message, if any, the players took from the unusual end to Friday’s practice because they largely downplayed it.
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“Did you see how hard we skated?” said veteran centre Nazem Kadri. “Did you see how quick the pace was?”
“I honestly have no idea,” added alternate captain Tyler Bozak. “I honestly think we were done and they might not just want us to do any extra out there today because it was a pretty hard practice and we’ve got a game tomorrow.”
“I’m not going to talk too much about any messages with that,” said struggling goalie Frederik Andersen. “I’ll let you guys speculate, but I think we just want to be ready for tomorrow. I think it’s another big test for us again.”
The most telling moment of Babcock’s scrum with reporters came from the questions he wouldn’t answer. He was asked if it’s tough for a coach when his players deliver a poor effort and there’s no apparent reason behind it?
“Yeah, I’m not going there,” said Babcock.
Why not?
“I’m just not.”
The implication is that he believes there are factors that explain why the Leafs delivered a dud in the middle of a light week. Be it complacency or something else, he’s just not willing to shed much light on them.
Instead, the coach chose to seize on the opportunity to create some internal pressure at a time when they aren’t feeling it externally.
“I think you’ve got to go through some things to understand kind of some things that are going on with your team,” said Babcock. “We have to fix this and look forward. I was pumped that the sun got up today and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”
Consider it an early test of what his group is made of.
