It’s tough to imagine a team losing as large a presence as the Detroit Red Wings did Wednesday and not batting an eye.
Well, Red Wings GM Ken Holland might have blinked once or twice.
Mike Babcock, by many measures, is the best pro hockey coach in the game today; a man with the resume, personality and larger-than-life stature to set the hockey world more abuzz than it has ever been for a relocation of a non-skate-wearing person.
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And to make matters worse, at least at a glance, Babcock spurned the Detroit Red Wings and their near quarter-century of impeccable playoff-making stability to rake in a reported $50 million while attempting to rescue the good ship Maple Leafs from what has basically been a decade (to be kind) of reeling from iceberg to iceberg.
Babcock became the richest head coach in hockey Wednesday, his annual salary more than doubling that of his closest rival. He takes his Stanley Cup, his gold medals, his stern-yet-reassuring bench presence away from a Red Wings franchise that may finally be sputtering to a sad stop, or may be a year or two away from completing an impressive reload on the fly–it depends on who you ask.
Either way, the franchise itself barely batted an eye. And for good reason. This is how they do business. It’s how you have to do business when you build for sustained success.
Holland met the media after Babcock’s big decision Wednesday…and he seemed decidedly nonplussed. He wished Mike well. He complimented the job he did. He looked towards the future. He sure didn’t seem shook. Because, after all, why should he fret over what is another natural evolution of his franchise? Especially when, as is usually the case in Detroit, a plan is already in place to assure a smooth transition to a new era.
Holland refused to confirm Grand Rapids Griffins head coach Jeff Blashill as Babcock’s successor Wednesday, but reading between the lines, he made it clear that Babcock’s protege was his preferred choice. (When pressed on alternatives, like former Penguins coach Dan Bylsma, Holland admitted warmly that Bylsma was…”a name”. And reports confirmed that “Dan Bylsma” is indeed a name of a person.)
Blashill, currently awaiting the Griffins’ opponents in the upcoming AHL conference finals, has other things on his mind than his next job right now, said Holland, but he added that the Wings list is only two or three names long and that Blashill is the “leading candidate.”
Continuity is a game the Wings play very well, and in addition to having already won the Calder Cup once in two full seasons in Grand Rapids (and currently chasing a second in three), the man expected to soon take the helm in Detroit has spent time developing a who’s who of Next Generation Red Wings–Gustav Nyquist, Tomas Tatar, Riley Sheahan, Brendan Smith, Xavier Oullette, Petr Mrazek, Luke Glendening, Landon Ferraro, Teemu Pulkkinen and, well, most of the other prospects who will soon (the organization hopes) become Red Wings regulars.
He also worked as Babcock’s assistant during the 2011-12 season, so he’s not totally unfamiliar with the older generation of Wings and their system, either. And this is how it works in Detroit—nothing lasts forever, so when it ends it must end with a plan in place.
It’s no coincidence that, since Holland took over as Red Wings GM in 1997, the franchise has seen the exodus of Sergei Fedorov, Steve Yzerman, Dominik Hasek, Brendan Shanahan, Nicklas Lidstrom, Brian Rafalski and many other Cup-winning cogs, and have managed to replace most of them (save Lidstrom) fairly seamlessly.
Off the ice, Holland has often seen his ranks raided by teams looking to snag a little bit of the Red Wings shine. That list starts with assistant coaches such as Todd McLellan, Paul MacLean and Bill Peters–who all graduated to head coaching gigs–but also includes Stars GM Jim Nill (who took a handful of scouts with him when he left for Dallas) and Lightning GM Yzerman, who rebuilt Tampa Bay in the Red Wings image and just beat his former boss in a seven-game series. Oh, and Scotty Bowman. Babcock, of course, is off to work for Shanahan in Toronto, so there’s another ex-Red Wings circle completed.
This is the main reason that it’s so hard to stay on top in the NHL, or any high-stakes sports league: The best teams lose their best people because they simply graduate from a system when they stagnate near the top, or there isn’t enough money to pay all the people who deserve it. It happens on the fields and off, and it’s a reality Detroit has confronted several times in the past decade.
It’s not possible to say if the Red Wings will survive the loss of Babcock as smoothly as they did the exits of other non-playing personnel, and it would be an insult to an excellent coach to say he had little to do with their past success. But in giving him kudos for his 2008 and ’09 runs, it’s also important to note that the team advanced beyond the first round just once in the past five years.
And if the Wings are going to turn that recent record around, it’s going to be on the backs of the next generation–the Nyquists, Tatars, Smiths and Pulkkinens. And they’re about to replace Mike Babcock with a coach who knows them as well as anyone and has already led them to one championship.
Just like they drew it up? Perhaps not, but a pretty damned good Plan B.