Toronto Maple Leafs new head coach Craig Berube speaks during an introductory media conference at in Toronto, on May 21.Dan Hamilton/Reuters
The most important thing about becoming an NHL head coach is looking like one.
Craig Berube looks like the coach who killed all the other coaches in a coaching Battle Royale. He’s an Easter Island statue wedged into a 48 regular suit.
If you thought Mike Babcock and Sheldon Keefe were hilarious, Berube, 58, makes the two of them seem like Key & Peele.
During Tuesday’s introductory press conference, the new Toronto boss smiled once. That was when club president Brendan Shanahan was telling a story about the time Berube beat the crap out of him.
Berube spent the rest of the presser either staring vacantly into the middle distance or rhyming off every conceivable cliche about styles of play (“fast,” “heavy,” “strong on pucks,” “structure in all three zones”).
Berube said only one important thing right at the beginning. It was when he was asked his impressions of the beaten-down roster of misfiring stars he is inheriting.
“The core player group is great here …” Berube said.
That’s when you knew where this is all headed. Back around for one more spin.
You really thought they would do it differently this time, didn’t you? You sucker. They got you again.
Ten years into the current regime, the Leafs have become the Justin Trudeau Liberals. They are the continuity candidates trying to convince a seething populace that they are actually revolutionaries.
In their season-ending autopsy less than two weeks ago, the Leafs tried to give the impression that major transformation was possible. On Tuesday, probably after making a few calls, they started walking that back.
Here’s general manager Brad Treliving on what he was looking for in a new coach:
“You need everyone. We’ve talked in this market here, this is not about one, two, three, four five people. It’s about a team. It’s about the Toronto Maple Leafs. The outside can use all kinds of catchy phrases about core fours and fives and threes and fours and fives. It’s about a team.”
What Treliving is describing here isn’t change. It’s a rebranding. The Core Four aren’t going anywhere, but the Core Four era is finished.
Welcome to the Three Musketeers era – all for one and one round for all.
Berube isn’t exactly a scalpel when it comes to public speaking. He could not stop himself from belabouring the message he’d been sent to deliver. He kept repeating the idea that “there’s some great players here,” and how all those great players had convinced him to take the job.
Okay, so now they’re now going to trade half the players that convinced their dream coach to come here?
In fairness to the Leafs, they never said anything about getting rid of anybody. It was the media who decided that Mitch Marner and John Tavares would have to go. But they skipped over the part about how they would be got rid of. Both have full no-trade protection.
Why would either agree to be traded? Because people want them to?
Next season is Marner’s year-long ad for free agency. So he’s supposed to ask to go to Utah and score 60 points, when he could work the power play with Auston Matthews and score 100? That sounds unusually selfless of him.
Tavares is in an even tighter spot. After next season, he’s a third liner on a middling club looking for someone who’s good in the room. This is the last time he’s ever wearing a ‘C’. It’s his final shot at being one of the main guys on a contender. Why would he give up on that?
Technically, Tuesday was Berube’s unveiling. Actually, it was the Leafs trying to get the fanbase on board with reality – that this is the team they’re stuck with.
The trick here is convincing people that the Leafs can change even if they make no changes.
That’s Berube’s job. If nothing else happens this off-season, he is the punishment for those who wouldn’t co-operate by leaving.
If that’s his role – hard man – Tuesday wasn’t a promising start. Berube kept going on about how amazing he thinks this team is. Imagine the arias he would sing about a club that hasn’t won only one playoff series in 20 years.
Treliving and Shanahan have learned to never use superlatives when talking about their team. It sends their customers into a frenzy. Watching Berube do that, over and over again, while sitting beside his new bosses, made the whole bunch of them seem delusional.
I get that he was interviewed, but did the three of them actually talk? Toronto isn’t St. Louis. People here don’t roll over and ask for a belly rub when you tell them how great they are. You stick your hand out in this city and they’ll go for your face.
Berube gave the impression of a guy who once coached in Philadelphia and thinks he has this hysterical-hockey-town thing figured out.
“I get all that,” Berube said, when asked about the pressure in Toronto. “But it’s not going to be weighing on my shoulders at all.”
This sounds like a man who should think about buying shoulder pads.
Maybe it’ll work. Berube is a winner. But so was Keefe (in the AHL). And Babcock. And Randy Carlyle.
The Leafs have had a lot of coaches who’ve won elsewhere. What none of them could figure out was how to handle this city, which wants you dead and up on a plinth at the same time.
They’ve all said they weren’t bothered by it, or that they looked forward to it, and they’ve all cracked in the end. Nothing about Berube’s résumé suggests he is different from his immediate predecessors.
They were all good guys players loved who told it like it is, but Toronto isn’t like other places. Nobody comes here to win. They come here to do whatever they need to in order to delay the inevitable.
When you think of it like that, based on everything he said Tuesday, Berube may have been born to coach the Leafs.