You can feel the eye rolling across the nation.
Only the Toronto Maple Leafs can hire a head coach for their minor league affiliate and it becomes a national story, right? You hear that sentiment all the time, and it’s not entirely wrong.
But if you dismiss the Sheldon Keefe story simply because you think it shouldn’t matter, or because you think it’s only a story because the Leafs have hired him, well, you’ll be missing a very good hockey story, a multi-layered one.
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There are just so many ways to look at Keefe’s hiring by the AHL Toronto Marlies Monday. Let’s look at three of them:
1. It’s the latest move by the Leafs in what has become an unprecedented strip-mining operation to grab the best and brightest from the Canadian Hockey League. It’s a high-profile NHL franchise, the league’s most valuable franchise, paying the highest of compliments to the CHL, essentially making a statement that if you want smart hockey people, look to the world’s top junior league.
Less than a year ago, the Leafs hired Kyle Dubas away from his post as general manager of the OHL Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. Next, they lured Mark Hunter from the OHL London Knights with a lucrative offer.
Hunter, now in charge of the team’s scouting, has since hired Jim Paliafito, who was GM of the OHL Saginaw Spirit, and Lindsay Hofford, London’s director of scouting.
Now comes Keefe, the CHL’s coach-of-the-year with the Greyhounds, at the same time the Leafs have an offer out to Kelly McCrimmon, owner/GM of the WHL Brandon Wheat Kings, to join the club in a front office position.
https://twitter.com/DamoSpin/status/607902438276788224
That’s five junior people hired in less than a year, with a sixth possible.
Part of this is pure practicality. You can get people away from junior teams, while those employed by NHL clubs aren’t always available. The New York Rangers, for example, won’t let the Leafs speak with assistant GM Jeff Gorton about Toronto’s vacant GM position. As well, you don’t have to compensate junior teams for taking their people, like the Leafs have to pay the Detroit Red Wings a third round pick in one of the next three drafts for signing head coach Mike Babcock.
Still, it’s hard to think of another team in recent history that has made such a strong statement that junior hockey is the ideal breeding and training ground for NHL coaches and executives.
2. It’s evidence that an NHL team can completely alter the way in which it does business and approaches the industry in a relatively short period of time. In other words, old dogs can learn new tricks.
Just two years ago, the Leafs lost in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs with a team largely designed and built by Brian Burke, who had by that time been fired. Burke believed, and believes, in the value of muscle and aggressive, physical hockey, and mocked more cerebral approaches to the game.
Even after he left his philosophies remained, and indeed the Leafs went out of their way the following fall to make sure they wouldn’t lose enforcers Colton Orr and Frazer McLaren, and in so doing had to sacrifice young centre Joe Colborne.
Under Randy Carlyle, the Leafs played a certain style, a rope-a-dope game with lots of toughness that didn’t embrace new beliefs in possession hockey, and ignored the analytics craze.
So that was April, 2013.
Today, virtually all vestiges of the Burke era have been wiped away, including his former right hand man Dave Nonis, fired as Toronto’s GM. Many of the Burke era scouts are gone, his hand-picked assistants Dave Poulin and Claude Loiselle were fired, the coaching staff of Carlyle is gone, including assistants Scott Gordon, Greg Cronin, Dave Farrish and Chris Dennis, and the minor league operation is being cleared out.
Ten players from the NHL roster from that time remain, and some of those players won’t be here next fall. Soon, there will be little evidence Burke was here at all.
Today, the Leafs have Brendan Shanahan leading the organization along with Dubas, Hunter and Brandon Pridham, and have invested in an analytics department. Babcock, a proponent of skillful, possession-oriented hockey, is the new $50 million head coach, and the team is looking to build a team on speed and skill rather than, ahem, truculence.
Keefe thinks that way as well, and has been entrusted with developing the young players the organization desperately needs.
https://twitter.com/DamoSpin/status/607906728500293633
It’s not clear whether this new brains-over-brawn approach will win, and certainly there’s a talent shortfall that will take some time to make up before the Leafs can become a force to be reckoned with.
But no longer can you say the Leafs are digging their heels in against the prevailing winds of the sport. Even they can change, apparently.
3. If you like stories of redemption, of second chances, Keefe’s story is for you.
We all know the history, of everything that happened when Keefe was a junior hockey player ensnared in the web of controversial hockey operator David Frost, part of a band of players who seemed willing to do just about anything Frost told them to do.
Mike Danton (Jefferson) got caught up in that web even worse than Keefe, and ended up going to prison for trying to kill Frost. Danton, who once had a promising NHL career, attended St. Mary’s to play CIS hockey after jail and is now playing professionally and raising a family in Poland, about as far as you can get from the hockey mainstream.
Keefe is at the other end of the spectrum. He’s slowly found his way back from pariah status, disavowing Frost and slowly building a coaching career, first with the Tier II Pembroke Lumber Kings, then in the Soo, then by taking on tasks with Hockey Canada.
Once part of a nasty band of hockey rebels, a player who famously refused to shake the hand of OHL commissioner David Branch when the Barrie Colts won the league title, he’s now acceptable to the establishment again, and has been hired by the NHL’s most valuable and scrutinized franchise.
“I don’t take a lot of time, just keep pressing on,” Keefe told me in a recent interview. “But there are times when I stop, think about what I’ve gone through, think about what I’ve overcome, and been grateful for opportunities people kept giving me despite all the baggage I carried with me that would have prevented most people from putting themselves out there.
“Much of my motivation on a daily basis is to prove those people right.”
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Keefe is open to questions about the Frost years, and he’ll get more now that he’s been hired by the Leafs. He knows any sniff that he is still in contact with Frost would probably get him fired, and accepts that.
Married with children, he is willing to discuss the past, and hopeful others will see him as a young man who made mistakes and wants to make a new life. The fact that after being hired by Dubas in the Soo he became a convert to hockey analytics and a style of play different than that he played himself makes him a progressive mind in what seems to be a newly progressive Leaf organization.
This is a good hockey story, a good human interest story, and there are hockey players and people in many places who have found themselves on the outside looking in, desperate to find a way back into the good graces of the game.
Keefe has done that, and by being open about his errors, not secretive. We’ll see how he fares now that hockey has accepted him back.
