SIMMONS: Craig Berube has built Maple Leafs into true Stanley Cup contender
Craig Berube has pushed all the right buttons in his first year coaching the Maple Leafs.
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One year ago today, Brendan Shanahan and Brad Treliving made the difficult decision to replace Sheldon Keefe as coach of the Maple Leafs.
Treliving knew then, as general manager, he wanted his own coach. Every general manager wants that. Keefe wasn’t hired by Treliving. He also knew that day — before any real search began — who he wanted to coach the Leafs.
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SIMMONS: Craig Berube has built Maple Leafs into true Stanley Cup contender Back to video
That man was Craig Berube. He was Treliving’s target from the beginning.
The hiring of Berube commenced a calendar year of sharp decision-making for the second-year general manager.
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And it showed relatively early in this National Hockey League season.
I started hearing about Berube’s Maple Leafs from other NHL coaches, before it was evident what direction the team was headed. Coaches love to sit around and talk hockey when reporters aren’t taking notes. They love to share stories and ideas and thoughts.
I kept hearing that the Leafs looked different this season, more mature in the way in which they approached the game. They looked and played more like winners.
Most of the coaches in the Atlantic Division I talked to said they believed this is the best version of the Maple Leafs in the Shanahan era.
The main cogs — new captain Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, former captain John Tavares and the veteran Morgan Rielly — were all still in place after so many seasons of promise and gut-wrenching defeat.
But around the Core Four — and even inside it — everything was changing for the better.
Shanahan forever has been in the camp of Matthews, Marner and Nylander as irreplaceable parts of the Maple Leafs roster. When he took over as president of the club more than 10 years ago, he vowed both privately and publicly to focus on acquiring talent for a franchise that had almost none.
The team, he believed, could be built around the high-end help they eventually drafted.
But Shanahan didn’t advocate for player change at the top level. He changed management. He changed coaches. He went from Mike Babcock to Keefe to Berube.
At GM, he went from Lou Lamoriello to Kyle Dubas — from the oldest to the younger. He then ran out of time on the Dubas plan, and the Dubas ego, and replaced him with Treliving, who has an old-school belief in how to build hockey clubs.
Treliving looked at the roster he inherited from Dubas, with almost no salary-cap flexibility, and realized the club would need to be remade on the fly. They needed more size, especially on defence. They needed more depth. And they needed a coach with a different approach.
Coaches can turn teams around in one season. We’ve seen this before. Pat Burns did it when he arrived in 1992. Pat Quinn did it when he arrived in 1998.
The Leafs had missed the playoffs in the seasons before Burns and Quinn. In their first years on the job, both teams came within a round of the Stanley Cup final.
Berube isn’t quite that far yet, but the possibility of doing a Burns or Quinn in his first year exists, as does the possibility of going further.
Under Berube, the Leafs gave up on the Dubas-Keefe treatise of puck possession. They went old style on the forecheck. They dumped the puck in more than they had ever managed before. They turned into a shot-blocking, get-in-the-shooting-lane, protect-the-house kind of defensive team.
It’s evident now with a 2-0 lead over the defending-champion Florida Panthers in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Berube knew coming into this season that with Matthews, Marner and Nylander, he had more upper-echelon talent than he had with his Stanley Cup championship team in St. Louis in 2019.
But he also was aware that four players don’t win Stanley Cups. Teams do.
Shanahan won his Cups in Detroit as a player with Steve Yzerman, Nick Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov as his teammates. He played with a boat-load of Hall of Famers, but also with the likes of Kris Draper centring Kirk Maltby and Darren McCarty.
You need a little bit of everything to win a Stanley Cup. You need a Sasha Barkov and a Sergei Bobrovsky, as Florida showed, but you also need a Sam Bennett and an Anton Lundell.
Shanahan has talked patience for years and, after a while, many had tuned him out.
He would point to how long it took Alexander Ovechkin to win his only Cup in Washington. He would point to his own journey as a player as an example of patience. He was in his 10th NHL season, playing for his fourth team, when he finally lifted the Cup.
Patience matters at times, but a first-year coach, the right coach, can change so much.
Very early on the job, Berube began establishing relationships with his star players. How was he going to treat them? How was he going to talk to them? How was he going to work with their ups and downs?
Quickly, he let it be known to the media that the Leafs weren’t about a Core Four or any nifty nickname any longer, they were about a team.
The template came to the Maple Leafs before he did. Burns had a similar approach some 30 years ago with the Leafs. He loved having Doug Gilmour as his star centre, but he discovered different places for almost every player in this team sport.
That’s what the best of coaches do. They establish roles. They fit the roster together like working on a jigsaw puzzle, when pieces are missing or not fitting in.
Berube has pushed all the right buttons in his first year coaching the Maple Leafs. The hiring, just a year ago this month, has turned out to be a great one.
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