Without a great deal of surprise, the Toronto Maple Leafs fired head coach Randy Carlyle this morning. That may not be true; the real surprise is that it took this long.
The Leafs have been an up and down team this season and the past few for that matter. After surging up the table in late November and early December with a 10-1-1 record, the bench has gone back to its old ways and have now lost seven of nine and many of those loses have been ugly including a 5-1 thrashing at the hands of the Winnipeg Jets over the weekend.
There is little to cheer and plenty to jeer in the Leafs’ efforts and the raining of sweaters to the ice at home and on road is telling.
“I want to thank Randy for all of his hard work and dedication,” Toronto general manager David Nonis said. “It’s never an easy decision to make when changing your leadership but our team was not trending in the right direction and we felt an immediate change was necessary.”
Trending in the right direction is an understatement. The losses have been one issue but the way the team has lost may have been a reflection of how the roster was responding to Carlyle.
The offense has disappeared since the 12-game run and the defense is nonexistent and has left the goalie tandem of Jonathan Bernier and James Reimer out to dry most nights with no one taking a body in the low slot and no one blocking shots out high.
But more than anything, Carlyle seemed to have pointed his finger at his own bosses for his problems with the team, Norris and Brendan Shanahan.
“You don’t always have the luxury to say that you’d like this player or that player or this type of player. That’s not the way it works,” Carlyle has said. “How it works is you have an organization that provides you with players, and our job, as we’ve said all along, is just to coach ’em up.”
With players no longer listening and a lost locker room added to the lost connection with the club’s leadership, Carlyle’s tenure was doomed. It just should not have taken this long.
And Carlyle is not the only one who should be going. The players own responsibility for their efforts or lack thereof on the ice.
Pick a position and imagine the player elsewhere, it is a roster that gave up on their coach and their sweater.
Assistants Peter Horachek and Steve Spott will assume coaching duties for Wednesday’s game against the Washington Capitals.
Carlyle, 58, has a career coaching record of 364-260-80.
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