SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.—The funny thing was, Mike Babcock had rarely looked happier. On the day of his firing as head coach of the Maple Leafs, with his team mired in a six-game winless streak, Babcock met the media with a perma-smile attached his face.Often known for his clipped, all-business demeanour during much of his tenure, Babcock was downright affable in the moments after he put the team through what turned out to be his final practice in a Maple Leafs sweatsuit. He joked about the unusually gloomy and wet Arizona weather. He rationalized the team’s flagging fortunes with an old trope about the sun still coming up in the morning.“As you know, today it didn’t,” he said.He was referencing heavy cloud cover. But he might as well have been foreshadowing his doom as the 30th coach in the team’s NHL history. That’s not to suggest the 56-year-old Babcock would have necessarily been happy to hear the news, delivered by team president Brendan Shanahan and general manager Kyle Dubas, that he’d been relieved of his duties and replaced by 39-year-old Marlies coach Sheldon Keefe, he of the zero career games as an NHL coach, assistant or otherwise. Nobody with an ego the size of Babcock’s likes to be told they’re something less than all-knowing and all-seeing.But lately you could certainly sense an odd peace in Babcock’s demeanour that seemed to grow in direct proportion to the length of his team’s ongoing slide. Only the lowly Devils, Senators and Red Wings sat below the Leafs in the Eastern standings on Wednesday if you measured by points percentage. But Babcock has been acting like a man on top of the world.Even Auston Matthews — the Leafs’ leading scorer, who has carried on an at times fractious relationship with the coach that’s required at least a couple of Babcock house calls to the Matthews family home here in Arizona — expressed some admiration for Babcock’s positi ...
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