Mike Babcock signed an 8-year / $50 million deal with the Toronto Maple Leafs on Wednesday (MapleLeafs.com)
By Hunter Crowther
The conversation started to change Wednesday morning.
TSN insider Darren Dreger threw a grenade on the hockey universe, reporting that the Buffalo Sabres and the Toronto Maple Leafs were bidding for the services of Mike Babcock, the man who won a Stanley Cup with the Detroit Red Wings in 2008, two Olympic gold medals in 2010 as well as 2014, and has built the Red Wings into one of the top-possession teams in the league.
Then Buffalo was out. The San Jose Sharks were in; just as quickly, they were out. Eventually, several reports confirmed that the Maple Leafs signed Babcock to a record-shattering 8-year/$50 million contract, trumping the currently highest-paid coach — Joel Quenneville with less than $3 million a year — and sending shockwaves across the National Hockey League.
Now, everyone has been able to chew on it for awhile, so let me throw my two cents in the discussion.
Let’s get this out of the way: the money is irrelevant. $50 million over eight years is equal to a little over $6 million per season, not to mention a big chunk of the contract is reportedly front-loaded, with some outlets saying he’ll make $8 million in those first few years. That’s a lot of money for a role that historically makes as much as your fringe second/third line forward in the NHL.
But this is the Toronto Maple Leafs. Whenever people bring up the richest and most scrutinized teams in sport such as the Dallas Cowboys, Manchester United, Los Angeles Lakers, New York Yankees, and for a long time, the blue and white were in that conversation. Unlike those teams, the Leafs play in a league with a hard salary cap, and can’t spend what they’re able to.
Over the years that I’ve followed this team, I have never understood why they didn’t spend as much as they could outside of players. Maple Leafs Sports & Entertainment has more money than a third of the planet’s countries. If there’s no cap on positions within an organization, why not spend as much as you can?
Maple Leafs President Brendan Shanahan was hired last spring, tasked with building a Stanley Cup winning franchise. It was assumed that he was given full autonomy on the club. He wouldn’t have taken the job, or headache depending on who you ask, unless he knew he was allowed to spend the resources available to him and build something from the ground up.
In the year Shanahan has been with Toronto…..
- He hired Kyle Dubas, the 28-year-old hot-shot general manager of the OHL’s Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds who was one of the first executives in hockey to embrace analytics
- He brought in Mark Hunter, a former NHLer who co-owned and led the London Knights to being the most powerful team in junior hockey over the 2000s
- He hired Darryl Metcalf, creator of the now-defunct analytics website ExtraSkater.com, and Cam Charron, who specializes in data analysis and was a prominent figure in the Toronto blogosphere
And now, he has hired the biggest free agent in coaching history.
In his introductory press conference Thursday morning, Babcock and Shanahan stressed how this is going to be a long, long, long process. The 52-year-old former Red Wings bench boss signed (extra) long term because he knows the Leafs need to go through a proper rebuild. Babcock is very confident in himself in making this team a winner and will be the ultimate challenge in hockey. So much was made about Babcock’s obsession with winning — or not losing — and how he wouldn’t want to be apart of a team that is rebuilding…funny, isn’t that exactly what Buffalo is doing? But it appears that wasn’t the case, and that he knows the road ahead.
“I have a plan in mind,” said Babcock when asked about the next few years. “If you don’t think pain is coming, there’s pain coming.”
That’s fine, Mike. Leaf fans have been through 48 years of pain.
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