Arrival of Mike Babcock boosts Maple Leafs hopes but Toronto must be wary of history repeating

The Toronto Maple Leafs decision to hire Mike Babcock is a good one but they must be wary of a repeat of the Ken Dryden situation, writes Rob McKenzie.

Toronto reportedly agreed to pay US$50 million (Dh183.6m) over eight years to prise Babcock away from his home in Detroit. Darren Calabrese / AP

We have been here before.

On Wednesday, the Toronto Maple Leafs hired as their coach Mike Babcock, a man regarded by many as the league’s best at his job.

The Leafs reportedly agreed to pay US$50 million (Dh183.6m) over eight years to prise Babcock away from his home in Detroit, where he had coached for 10 years, making the play-offs every season and winning the 2008 Stanley Cup.

Toronto last won the Cup in 1967.

Leafs Nation is desperate for a winner. Desperate. And now with Babcock in charge the fans will allow their hopes to rise.

Just as they rose in 1997, when the team, then as now, hired a man universally respected, a man worthy of the Hall of Fame, to lift it from the mire.

That man was Ken Dryden, one of the sport’s great goaltenders and a person of towering intellect. His book The Game is a thoughtful evocation of the life of a champion athlete, and is rightly ranked among the top North American sports books.

In May of 1997 the Leafs made Dryden team president. Six months later, as he watched the team during a rare win, he remarked to EM Swift of Sports Illustrated:

“Every game you lose is 30 years plus one ... That’s the mire of it. Dealing in an environment of a history of failure. The biggest challenge is breaking the back of that history. You don’t do that with one good year. You need two or three or four years in a row. There’s such an atmosphere of hope here and expectation, which is wonderful. But hope turns on its ear very quickly. And frustrated hope is destructive.”

Babcock, rather more prosaically, expressed much the same idea — that if the culture can change, then success will follow. “We have good people here,” he said at a press conference. “We are going to acquire good people and we are going to make them better. I am a schoolteacher and I believe your job is to make people around you better.”

The Babcock case could end as sadly as the Dryden case. Dryden left the team in 2004 after destructive infighting in the front office had eroded his authority. The culture of failure can tug a good man down.

But in the end, Toronto has done a smart thing. The ship was sinking yet now it is righted and sailing forward. Finally.

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