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Mike Babcock admitted that while money would play a role in his choice of coaching destinations, it wouldn’t be the deciding factor.
It was about family, he insisted and about winning.
The two things he stated he treasures most.
Then the Toronto Maple Leafs came calling Wednesday, backed a Brinks truck full of money up to his front door and gave him the kind of term a professional coach can only dream of.
He couldn’t grab a pen fast enough, and who can blame him?
It’s $50 million after all people.
That’s a lot of dough.
Detroit Red Wings general manager Ken Holland described that amount as “staggering.”
“Superstar players don’t make that amount of money,” Holland said of the eight-year, $50-million pact that convinced Babcock to leave the Wings after 10 seasons and take over as coach of the Leafs. “I don’t even know if there’s three or four players in the league who make that kind of money.”
What we do know today is this – it was about the money.
Babcock’s wife Maureen was adamant that she didn’t want to leave the Detroit area, so this wasn’t a decision about family.
In the decade that Babcock has been in charge of the Wings, Toronto has made the playoffs once and never won a post-season series, so winning certainly had no bearing on his choice.
But the money? Holy cow.
Yes it’s stupid money, and stupid term for that matter, but it’s the Leafs after all.
Overpaying is the only way they were going to convince Babcock to move to their club. It's similar to what the sad-sack Detroit Tigers were forced to do as they sought to rise from the depths, overpaying for the old and the infirm, players like Pudge Rodriguez and Magglio Ordonez, in order to convince others that Detroit was a destination.
Sure it got Toronto one of the best, if not the best coach in the NHL, but he still needs a team to put on the ice. Babcock may require the vast majority of those eight years just to assemble a club that is capable of achieving contender status.
In Toronto, he gets significantly more money while dealing with significantly lower expectations. If Babcock finds a way to make the Leafs a playoff team next season, he'll be feted as a genius.
In Detroit, he'd be expected to deliver far more in terms of results for the season to be considered a success.
Trust me on this, though – every other coach in the game is toasting Babcock today.
He didn’t merely raise the bar on NHL coaching salaries. He drove it into the stratosphere.
With one signature, Babcock, who made $2 million this season, more than tripled his annual salary. His stipend dwarfs the $2.9 million earned this season by Chicago’s Joel Quenneville, who up until Wednesday was the NHL’s highest-paid coach.
The Wings made one last-ditch pitch to keep Babcock in town, offering him a five-year deal with $4 million a season, nowhere near what the Leafs were offering and with good reason.
The Wings have been a team on a treadmill in recent seasons. They haven’t won a playoff series past the first round since 2009 and show one post-season series triumph over the past three springs.
In this self-proclaimed Hockeytown, those numbers are unacceptable.
“I certainly felt that Mike had 3-4-5 years that he could continue to get the most out of our group but to start to think that you were going to go beyond that, again, 10 years is an eternity in professional sports,” Holland said.
“Mike totally understood. Now there’s another opportunity for us here going forward.”
Holland said he had a short list in mind for a new coach, but in reality, it’s a list that likely starts and ends with Jeff Blashill, the coach of their AHL farm team in Grand Rapids.
The Wings gave him a $200,000 raise to a $400,000 annual salary last spring in exchange for turning down the chance to interview with five other NHL teams. Holland didn’t do that to keep Blashill down on the farm when the Detroit job came open.
“I talked to Blash today,” Holland said. “I’m waiting to see their playoff schedule because they’re going into the third round. Once I know the schedule I’m going to go down and spend a day with him.
“He’s certainly a leading candidate. I haven’t made a final decision. I need to spend some time with him before I know anything.”
If nothing else, the one thing Babcock jumping from Detroit to Toronto has accomplished is to add another spark to an already heated and long-standing rivalry.
“After a process, Mike decided to go somewhere else,” Holland said. “We're not going to fold the franchise, we're going to go to work, we're going to try to beat Mike.
“Mike's in Toronto, Mike's down the road. Mike, he wants to go into Toronto and help them make the playoffs.
“Well, we want to be in that race, we want to finish ahead of him so it's certainly going to make for an interesting kind of side story as we head into the '15-16 season.”
“Our goal is to beat Mike.”
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