There were signs. The David Clarkson buyout, namely. Wednesday, though, brought 50 million more of them: The Toronto Maple Leafs, under Brendan Shanahan, have figured out what to do with all that money.
Toronto — specifically, ownership group Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment — swooped into the closing seconds of the Mike Babcock sweepstakes and took home the prize. Babcock, a Stanley Cup winner and perennial contender in his 10 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings, is going to coach the Leafs. And he didn’t come cheap.
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Babcock, expected as late as Wednesday morning to either return to Detroit or join the Buffalo Sabres, signed an eight-year, front-loaded $50 million deal, according to multiple reports. He could make $8 million in the first three years of the deal (more than triple the next-highest coach’s salary) and bail after five seasons, according to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman.
That’s a nice failsafe to have in place; this is still the Leafs we’re talking about, and the truly ugly part of their rebuild might not have yet begun. Still, if there’s been a reason to believe in this franchise in its recent history, it’s today. So, it’s not crazy to bank on Babcock, 52, being around for Year 6.
Mike Babcock Getty Images
In the salary-cap era, the Leafs’ gargantuan revenue stream has been something of a Catch-22. Despite it, they could spend as much on players as anyone else, and the people making the decisions weren’t making wise ones. Sure, they could hand $36.75 million to Clarkson, a third-line winger with one solid, shooting percentage-bulwarked season under his belt, in 2013 and not feel the crunch in the books. Sure, they could pay Mikhail Grabovski, one of their few play-driving forwards, to go away that same summer.
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The financial consequences weren’t a consideration in those decisions, and the hockey rationale behind them was flawed enough to help create a team cap-strapped and terrible enough to get its last general manager, Dave Nonis, rightly fired after the 2014-15 season. What’s the point in having all that money if you can only spend some of it, and then spend it unwisely?
Enter Shanahan, who used his blank-check capabilities to hire a forward-thinking front office led, for now, by assistant GM Kyle Dubas and a revamped analytics squad, and director of player personnel Mark Hunter. Those two are as good as anyone in their fields, and now they have a coach to match, with a replacement for Nonis yet to be named.
Those expenditures aren’t covered by the cap. The Leafs can go out and hire a few more Babcocks and not come out operatively weaker from a financial standpoint. If you have money to burn, you spend it where you can, and you spend it in the right ways. If nothing else, the days of Nonis bragging about an unspent analytics budget are far, far gone.
And really, there are signs of it paying off already for Shanahan, beyond the Babcock news. Having the right guys in place helped lead to selecting William Nylander eighth overall in the 2014 NHL Draft. Small, skilled wingers are an undervalued asset, and the Leafs seemed to recognize it, even without Dubas or Hunter in place. Nylander rewarded them with 32 points in 34 AHL games at 19 years old.
It goes beyond him, too; here’s a taste of the sort of stuff Dubas says for public consumption. In short, it’s the exact sort of mindset that was missing in the league’s biggest market, where short shrift was given to ideas as simple as “having the puck” as recently as a year ago.
And that’s the exact sort of mindset — future-focused with a sense of how to exploit an inherent economic advantage, whether through salaries or otherwise — that landed Babcock in Toronto. There has been a fair amount of analytically based discussion over how big, exactly, Babcock’s impact is on his teams, and that’s not totally out of place. It is shortsighted, though; he’s better than almost everyone else, and has both the right ideas and the cache to get anyone (ask the past two Canadian Olympic teams) to buy into them.
(You know how, when you want something and sense that you’re not going to get it, you convince yourself that you didn’t really want it in the first place? The whole “how good is Babcock, really?” discussion, for what it’s worth, had that feel.)
Most importantly, Babcock is an upgrade, and crazy as it is to say about a salary higher than any NHL coach’s in history, comes at a relatively low cost to the Leafs. Why not flex that financial muscle when you can?
It’s not going to be necessarily easy, either. Saying the right things, like the Leafs have done, and then actually turning it into action on a large, sustained scale are two different things. But the things that made the Sabres job more attractive than sticking with Detroit — raising the bar on NHL coach salaries, and building a contender in a success-starved, hockey-crazy market — are writ larger with the Maple Leafs. In Buffalo, there was money and the potential for glory. In Toronto, there’s at least as much money and more potential for glory.
That whole exercise, though, was filtered through a sense, as recently as last night, that Babcock didn’t really want the Leafs job and specifically that he didn’t have the stomach for a few ugly years; Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf, by the definition of a rebuild, lead a group of veterans possibly on the way out, and getting better after that, long-term gains aside, isn’t going to happen immediately. The Sabres have a real shot at being better faster.
Five years out aside, though, the Leafs sold him. In their world, $50 million on a great coach is a justifiable cost, and they paid it. Wise, and better late than never.