It was about, Nonis said, consistency, or the lack of it.
“One of the things you’ve all heard me talk about is consistency,” Nonis told media when announcing his decision. “We need to see some level of consistency. We all agree we had some good stretches here but I can’t stand here and tell you our group’s been consistent.”
Got Leafs back to Stanley Cup playoffs
For now, Nonis said he will replace Carlyle with his two assistants, Peter Horacheck and Steve Spott, though he did not rule the possibility of bringing a head coach in from elsewhere.
He came in at the end of the 2011-12 season, replacing Ron Wilson, and had two full seasons and parts of two others as the Leafs’ coach, getting them into the playoffs in the lockout shortened 48-game season in 2012-13, their first playoff appearance in eight seasons. They lost a heartbreaking first round 7 game series to the Boston Bruins and missed the playoffs last season.
He was 91-78-19 in 188 games as the Leafs’ head coach.
This year consistency has indeed been missing. They went 10-1-1 during one stretch, including back-to-back wins over arch-rival Detroit Red Wings, but lately have gone 2-7 and were never in some games. The team sits in the eighth and final playoff spot in the NHLs Eastern Conference with a record of 21-16-3, one point up on the Boston Bruins and two up on the Florida Panthers, who have three games in hand.
Maple Leafs lose to Jets
A 5-1 loss in Winnipeg on Saturday night, attended by team president Brendan Shanahan, was particularly hard to watch for Leafs fans. The club didn’t compete hard and seemed to be going through the motions. After that game, his last as coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Carlyle seemed to make a veiled criticism of management, implying they needed to make some player changes.
“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,” he said Saturday. “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.”
The 58-year-old Carlyle began NHL life as a second-round draft pick of the Maple Leafs in the 1976 entry draft. He scored the first two of his 148 NHL goals as a Leaf before being dealt to the Pittsburgh Penguins. He played six seasons in Pittsburgh and then nine in Winnipeg with the Jets. He won the Norris Trophy as top defenceman in the league while with the Pens in 1980-81.
“It’s always a tough decision,” Nonis said of the firing. “But we felt we had to make the decision because of the direction the team was heading in.”
