Sheldon Keefe was the Maple Leafs’ fall guy. Why this season should tell us who’s really to blame

Being coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs is one of the most public-facing roles in pro sports. The NHL protects its star players from the media glare like few other leagues, with Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner getting plenty of days off from submitting to pesky questions. Their coach, whether it has been Mike Babcock or Sheldon Keefe or, now, Craig Berube, rarely has been so lucky.
The Leafs coach is almost never exempt from a grilling. And if that gives the coach a rare platform to craft a message and communicate with fans, it also never tells us precisely how skilfully that coach is getting through to the team. Because let’s face it: Measuring a coach’s effect on his team — how much credit he should get for wins, how much blame he should take for losses — is one of hockey’s inexact sciences.
Watching the Amazon series that briefly chronicled the Leafs’ latest playoff failure, as seen mostly from the perspective of the migraine-suffering, dog-walking William Nylander, gave us at least a little insight into how Keefe was doing before he was fired in May. And the truth is, in the brief moments Keefe is caught on camera in “Faceoff: Inside the NHL,” he is saying exactly the right things.
Now, Amazon selectively edits these productions, which are less documentary than hagiography. But Keefe’s key scene comes in the second intermission of Game 7 of last spring’s playoff series with the Bruins. With the score tied at zero, Keefe implores his team to do what every successful playoff team ultimately does: Get to the net with force.
“We haven’t beaten this goaltender off a clean shot the entire series. They protect inside. You’ve got to f—-ing drive right through,” Keefe says. “That’s where the goals are, OK? Puck’s got to get there. People got to get there.”
For a moment, after Nylander scored from the slot to make it 1-0 midway through the final frame of regulation, it looked like a happy ending was afoot. Alas, after Hampus Lindholm equalized and David Pastrnak skated untouched through the Leafs to score in overtime, the conclusion was too familiar. Toronto lost. A coach took the fall. Keefe’s successor, Craig Berube, became the fifth coach of the Brendan Shanahan era.
And so we come to Thursday night’s Leafs-Devils game, wherein Keefe, snapped up by New Jersey a couple of weeks after he was let go, will coach against Matthews and Marner and Nylander for the first time.
There isn’t a whiff of hard feelings, not like there was after Babcock was axed and the dirty laundry began to be aired of Babcock’s penchant for bizarre mind games.
“In this business over a period of time, the message stops hitting home,” Leafs general manager Brad Treliving said upon firing Keefe.
It says a lot that, when Keefe was fired in May, his career points percentage of .667 ranked first in NHL history.
Now, you can put an asterisk or two on that impressive number. For one, Keefe’s points percentage in Toronto ranked first all-time among those who’ve coached at least 300 games. According to Hockey-Reference.com, there are 130 men who’ve met that threshold. And from the peerless Scotty Bowman on down, nobody has picked up points at a higher rate.
For another, points percentage, while it’s the easiest number to use when comparing hockey records, is a bit of an apples-to-oranges stat because it doesn’t judge coaches equally through history. Since the NHL began the era of the three-point game in 1999-2000, first instituting a point for the loser in overtime before doing the same for losers in the shootout, points have been easier to come by. So Bowman’s .657 career winning percentage, not far off Keefe’s .667 points percentage, would presumably have gotten a nice bump if he had coached more than a couple of seasons in the loser-point era.
Beyond all that, Keefe’s regular-season points percentage was never the problem in Toronto. The problem was that, in five runs to the post-season with the Leafs, Keefe came out on the winning end of one series. That adds up to a .432 career winning percentage in the playoffs, where there are no points for losing. That ranks 77th among the 86 NHL coaches with at least 30 playoff games under their belt.
Whose fault is that? Everybody knows the game changes in the playoffs. Time and space get pinched. Goals are harder to come by. Will tends to trump skill. And so the Leafs, the highest-scoring team in the league since Matthews joined the squad, have scored two or fewer goals in 13 of their most recent 14 playoff games.
If you’re following Treliving’s logic, you’re of the belief the Leafs stopped scoring when it matters because they stopped absorbing Keefe’s message, and not because the Leafs, as constructed, simply aren’t very good at getting to the areas where goals are scored the playoffs. We’ll see about that in six months or so.
Until then, we’ll see how Berube crafts the daily message in the hopes of changing the perennial outcome.