TORONTO — There are differing demeanours, senses of humour and their respective stances on goalies.
It always seems to come back to the goalies.
Mike Babcock has delivered blunt assessments on the underperforming duo of Jonathan Bernier and James Reimer regularly since becoming head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
His predecessor, Randy Carlyle, refused to go there.
Carlyle preferred to treat his goalies like they were a pitcher entering the ninth inning with a no-hitter. Shhhhhh, don’t mention it. For him, the practice actually began while he coached the AHL’s Manitoba Moose.
“Well the one thing you won’t get from me is the starter,” Carlyle told reporters in March 2012, days after being hired by the Leafs. “You can ask all you want — believe me, I’ve done this for seven years and it’s the one thing I would ask you to accept from me that I’m not going to tell you who’s starting.”
Is there a reason for that?
“I’m superstitious.”
Babcock is a lot of things, but superstitious wouldn’t be one of them. He has a rigorous devotion to the process and is fond of saying “everyone has to own their own stuff.”
So when Bernier allows goals on the opening shot in back-to-back games? The coach addresses it head-on. When Reimer gets beaten four times on 24 shots, as he did in a loss to Arizona earlier this week, Babcock says: “You can’t give up four to them on the chances we gave up tonight. It’s impossible. You just can’t do that.”
Carlyle, you may recall, set off a mini-controversy in March 2014 simply by saying that Reimer was “just OK” in a loss at Detroit.
Part of the reason for that uproar was that he literally never commented on a goaltender’s individual performance, let alone offered a tepid assessment after a game where the team was poor defensively and narrowly clinging to a playoff spot.
The challenge of coaching an NHL team goes well beyond instructing “X’s and O’s.” There are daily media sessions where reporters poke and prod, often zeroing in on any issue that carries a hint of tension or strife.
Faced with a never-ending stream of questions, every coach develops failsafe answers that help him steer clear of trouble.
Carlyle would typically begin a sentence with “again” when he had decided to go back to the script rather than meet a query head on. Babcock, who has written a motivational book, often veers into one of the numerous catchphrases about life or the value of hard work he always seems to have at the ready.
“If we just focus on the day we’re in, and we put our energy into it and get ready for the next day, I think we have a chance to get better,” he said when training camp opened last month. “The biggest challenge today is whatever I’m doing now. If you live in the moment and focus on what you are doing and you put everything into that, I think you have a chance to be successful.”
Babcock brings an intense business-like approach to his daily media scrums, usually keeping the sessions to five minutes or less and often ending them on his own. While a typical Carlyle post-practice interview might include several long answers and a playful barb or two tossed at reporters, Babcock prefers to cut to the heart of the matter and use an economy of words.
Ironically, their reputations are flipped among the players they coach.
Outside of the systematic changes in playing style, the biggest difference the veteran Leafs have observed this season is how much more dialogue there is. Nazem Kadri, for example, indicated that he has a 1-on-1 chat with Babcock virtually every day.
“In past years, the communication has been lacking a bit,” said Kadri. “It’s just nice to have that daily conversation about what you need to do.”
Of course, there is more than one way for a coach to try and win hockey games.
The Leafs didn’t do enough of that in two-plus years under Carlyle and are off to an expectedly slow start in the early days of Babcock’s tenure.
With one win in eight games heading into Friday’s visit to Madison Square Garden, he hasn’t shied away from discussing the problem areas. Asked this week if Bernier and Reimer need to raise their games, he responded: “Oh for sure.”
“There’s another level for us all to get to,” said Babcock. “They can both be way better, we expect them to be better, we’ve got to be better in front of them so they have less (work), but I also think in today’s NHL there’s always someone in front of you.
“You can always find a way for why it went in. But some guys just don’t let them in, so that’s how we’ve got to — we’ve got to be better in that area.”
All we can do is imagine what the response might have been if Carlyle had ever said something like.
Trust me: Those aren’t the kind of words he’d utter into a microphone.
