Update (2025-03-31): Wouldn’t you know it? Right after I wrote and posted this, the Leaf power-play went on a tear, scoring in 12 of 16 opportunities, or something like that. Just devastating, quick passes, constant motion, accurate shooting. We’ll see if it lasts.
It is very difficult to assess the impact of a coach upon the performance of any particular NHL team. Scotty Bowman is the most obvious avatar of success in this position after leading Montreal to four consecutive Stanley Cups, and then, after leaving Montreal (due to a dispute with management over promoting him to General Manager), coached Pittsburgh to it’s second consecutive Stanley Cup, and then Detroit to two consecutive Stanley Cups.
Bowman was not successful everywhere or all the time, but he was certainly among the most successful coaches in NHL history. But was he really a brilliant mastermind of strategy and player development or did he just happen to inherit teams that were stocked with great players and on the cusp of elevated achievements– no matter who was coaching? It’s impossible to know. His success in Montreal led Pittsburgh (and other teams) to want him, but he also knew that Pittsburgh had Sidney Crosby and a host of other very good players and he was able to write his own ticket. From 1979 to 1987 he coached Buffalo with limited success (1st, 3rd, 3rd, 2nd, 3rd, 5th) and was finally fired after they finished fifth in 1986. He didn’t seem to have the magic then. He moved to Detroit in 1996-97, which had Steve Yzerman, and Sergei Fedorov, Nicklas Lidstrom, Larry Murphy, Brendan Shanahan. They later acquired Dominick Hasek. So it was a team stacked with very good players, especially Fedorov and Yzerman, and, later, Hasek ( who replaced Chris Osgood).
Teams have won with brilliant, speedy offense. They have won with steady, tough defense. They have won with a combination of both. There is no one consistent formula. Montreal, with a mediocre team, made it to the finals a few years ago almost solely on the strength of their goalie, Carey Price.
I suspect that coaching shows up the most in three areas: the power play, the penalty kill, and defending a lead. (No amount of good coaching can get you a lead if you don’t have skilled players up front, but a well-disciplined team can frustrate a more talented team if they want to.) This is where I am least impressed by Craig Berube’s work with the Leafs. They don’t do particularly well in any of those three areas, especially lately (March 2025). They have had the lead in five of their last six games and lost five of their last six games. They keep pulling the goalie and giving up empty net goals (they have only twice scored while 6 on 5 all year). They persist in believing that Morgan Rielly should get lots and lots of ice time even though he is -19 on a team with most players on the plus side. Contrary to the evidence, they think Mitch Marner is an effective penalty killer, even while Berube obviously discourages counter-attacks while shorthanded, which I believe is a mistake. They keep putting Max Domi on the ice though he doesn’t check all that well, almost never scores, and doesn’t even seem to have any idea of what he should be doing out there. He is getting about $2.9 million a year. For what?
Why did the Leafs bring Berube on board? Because he won the Stanley Cup with St. Louis in 2019? His record since then is rather mixed to say the least: 1st, 4th, 3rd, 6th, then fired.
I don’t see how he was an improvement from Keefe, who actually had one of the best winning records in the history of the Maple Leafs. Keefe was obviously fired because of the Leafs’ failure to move past the first or second round in the playoffs, in spite of rather good regular season performances. Berube’s current record is mostly, I think, the result of better goal-tending. Up to now, Joseph Woll and Anthony Stolarz have been excellent. They were a big improvement on Frederik Anderson and Jack Campbell and the inconsistent Ilya Samsonov.
Woll and Stolarz were brilliant in goal for a time. Lately, not so much. Marner generates a lot of offense but four times in the last two games– 4 times!– he entered the opponent’s zone during a promising power play set up and gave the puck away. These were not bad passes that didn’t work: they were bald-faced giveaways, throwing the puck right onto the stick of an opponent. These happened as the power play squad was taking up positions and so were out of position to deal with a break-out. They also robbed the power play of crucial zone time.
Nylander scores a lot of goals, because he poaches up by the blue line. He rarely goes into a corner and emerges with the puck. He often skates by opponents with the puck and kind of waves at them. When he does have the puck, he can be very skilled, and very fast, and he has a very good shot. I’m not sure how big of a trade-off his defensive lapses are, given his offense. And I don’t understand why Berube doesn’t demand that Nylander make more of an effort to defend when he doesn’t have the puck.
Matthew Knies gets better and better every game. Matthews is a thoroughbred, a terrific two-way player. Tanev and McCabe are okay on defense– not often brilliant but not a liability either. If Woll and Stolarz can recover their mid-season form, the Leafs have as realistic a chance as any of the other top 8 to advance to the Stanley Cup Finals.
Rielly is the Cal Ripken of the Maple Leafs, and that is not a compliment. Ripken was subpar short-stop with limited range who got to play every day because he could be a decent hitter. But ultimately I think he hurt the team by refusing, as he aged and lost mobility, to move to third-base or DH where he belonged. Rielly is thought to belong to the number one pair of defensemen on the Leafs but he is clearly a liability. I would move him down to the third pair and give him a lot less ice-time. He is -19 at the moment: that is terrible for someone earning his salary.
[As an aside: while Cal Ripken was in his pursuit of the all-time consecutive games played record, I firmly believed that the Orioles would never win a championship. They had become Ripken-centric. He even stayed in a separate hotel when they were on the road. And, of course, the Orioles remained a mediocre team through the latter years of Ripken’s career.]
I don’t believe in the idea that the Leafs have some fatal weakness that plays out every playoff season. They have made the playoffs seven years in a row, and they have been very close to advancing several times. Several times, they ended up losing to a very good team that went on to the finals. The factors that play into the decisive win are rather random– a bad play in overtime, a lucky bounce, a deflection, a post instead of the corner of the net, playing the eventual Stanley Cup winner in the first round.
One of these times, the Leafs will take the big game, or they may not. But they are legitimate contenders and in a few years Leaf fans may look back on this era as time of high expectations because they are really quite good, and disappointing achievements because they have been unlucky.