This has been one, long warmup lap.
About eight months worth of a slow jog, and the Detroit Red Wings did manage to do an awfully good job of making sure the Mike Babcock Watch didn’t metastasize and destroy their season.
But the preliminary stretches, like the Detroit season, are now over. Like the charge to the 2016 U.S. presidential contest, the race to find out where Babcock will land is officially on as of this morning.
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We start, not unfairly, from the assumption that Babock won’t be staying in Detroit. If he was, he would have signed by now, correct? That seems right, although that’s a very good job, and the Wings have done an impressive job of starting the transition from Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg to a new generation of players, while at the same time making post-season play for a 24th consecutive season.
In Tomas Tatar, Gustav Nyquist, Petr Mrazek, Dan DeKeyser and Riley Sheahan, there’s a lot of hope for the future, plus other talented youngsters such as Anthony Mantha and Teemu Pulkkinen with the Grand Rapids farm club currently playing the Toronto Marlies in the AHL playoffs.
Enough future promise for Babcock? That’s an interesting question. Since winning the Cup in 2008 and then making it to the ’09 final, the Wings have had six good regular seasons followed by six playoffs that were, to different extents, disappointing for a wide variety of reasons. In those six springs, the Wings have won three playoff series, and lost six.
The Wings led this spring’s series against Tampa and twice could have eliminated the Bolts, but couldn’t close. Babcock praised the team’s effort against a tough opponent, to which veteran Detroit columnist Drew Sharp responded with, “The Wings are sounding like the Lions. And that’s frightening.”
In the three seasons since Nicklas Lidstrom retired, the Wings have won just one playoff series, and gone out in the first round the past two springs. Datsyuk and Zetterberg were great players and still can be on certain nights, but injuries have worn at their reliability and production.
We’re still finding out how good the new kids will be, but we do know that in Grand Rapids head coach Jeff Blashill, the Wings have a new young coach ready to take over.
Regardless, Babcock will want to improve his situation, and he’s earned that. To do so, he can pursue a better location, a better chance to win, more power and, of course, more money.
Detroit, a bankrupt city, may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but the downtown is only where you play if you’re a Red Wing, and there are lots of lovely suburbs. The weather is the weather, not necessarily appealing from December through March if you crave sunshine and warmth.
Detroit has a spectacular new rink coming, scheduled to be finished by the summer of 2017. But the Wings concede that even with that, and even with owner Mike Ilitch’s money, they can’t compete with other NHL clubs who can pay Babcock the largest salary ever given to an NHL coach, which is probably what he’ll get.
And power? The Wings are extraordinarily successful because they have an excellent organization with straight lines of authority. The chances of GM Ken Holland willingly ceding any of that to a coach seems remote. Finally – and has anyone thought of this, really? – the Wings organization may, after this string of spring failures, be ready to move on to another coach.
Many have assumed all along the Wings are the partner in this marriage desperately trying to make it last. But maybe they don’t covet Babcock nearly as much as other teams do. And definitely not enough to pay him $4 million a year when they can pay the well-respected Blashill less than one-quarter of that.
So here are the other possible landing places: Philadelphia. Buffalo. Edmonton. Toronto. San Jose. Maybe Boston. Maybe St. Louis.
The Leafs, Flyers, Sabres and Oilers have deep-pocketed owners and probably the greatest willingness to pay. Toronto and Philly are corporately controlled, which may not appeal to Babcock after working for Ilitch, arguably the NHL’s best single owner.
San Jose has the most generous climate, and it’s not close. Boston and Toronto have the most vibrant, cosmopolitan downtowns, if Babcock fancies that.
Only Toronto, really, has the ability to give Babcock significant power after the firing of GM Dave Nonis. A coach with a say in player personnel could fit comfortably within Brendan Shanahan’s newly designed cabinet structure.
Edmonton, of course, offers enormous competitive upside with Connor McDavid and the existing cast of young bucks. The Leafs and Sabres seem the furthest away from being competitive, and they are the biggest rebuilding jobs. The Bruins – who have yet to decide on Claude Julien – may have to take a major step back and re-tool.
The Blues, meanwhile, are the team closest to actually winning a Cup out of the possible contenders, although they’ve not parted ways with Ken Hitchcock yet, or given him a new contract. GM Doug Armstrong would know Babcock well from their Canadian Olympic connections.
But St. Louis almost certainly can’t pay what the Flyers, Leafs, Oilers and Sabres would. Ditto for the Sharks, and like St. Louis, San Jose has a deeply entrenched GM already in place unlikely to cede power.
Philly has first-year GM Ron Hextall, but a boss in Ed Snider who can get trigger happy when things don’t go well. One wonders if Babcock could get a say there as the Flyers try to build on the dynamic scoring duo of Claude Giroux and Jakub Voracek.
So if you’re looking at those four elements – location, quality of roster, money, power – the teams that would appear to have the most to offer Babcock would be Philadelphia, Toronto and Edmonton, where former Hockey Canada boss Bob Nicholson is now running the show.
And none of those teams are an absolutely perfect fit, although each has advantages in this competition. Out of those three teams, the Flyers have oodles of cash, two stars and some promising pieces, and a city where players love to work and live, particularly in the suburban areas across the border in New Jersey.
The lure of McDavid has to be compelling to any coach, and as a westerner, Alberta certainly isn’t a strange and faraway land to Babcock.
And the Leafs? He has a connection to Shanahan, who he coached, and like Cliff Fletcher, Pat Burns, Ken Dryden, Pat Quinn and Brian Burke, talented hockey people tend to look at Toronto, see all the obvious land mines, but then believe they can be one to make it finally work.
Without that kind of ambition and confidence, they wouldn’t otherwise be talented hockey people.
So without really knowing Babcock’s priorities – he’s done a job of keeping those well under wraps – the most logical signs seem to point to Philadelphia, if Detroit is already in his rear view mirror.
Now we’ve got another two months, quite probably, to see how this plays out.
