After signing with Toronto, I highly doubt he looks as angry as he does in our featured image!
Former Anaheim Ducks head coach Mike Babcock turned the hockey world upside down yesterday when he signed a eight-year, $50 million deal that will make him the head coach of the beleaguered Toronto Maple Leafs.
I have no vested interest in where Babcock coaches – Toronto, Buffalo, Detroit, it’s all the same to me – but that doesn’t mean I am entirely thrilled with the decision and the implications for the league now that the Leafs have decided that playing with Monopoly money is not just something teams reserve for player negotiations any more.
Two things trouble me about Babcock’s new deal: the process, and the results of the process.
If you followed the story and found yourself thinking, “Man, this sounds more like teams trying to sign a free agent than a head coach,” you were right on the money: Mike Babcock was a free agent. As Michael Rosenberg at SI.com points out,
"Great coaches have jumped from one team to another before, of course. We’ve seen it with Bill Belichick, Larry Brown, Bill Parcells, Pat Riley, Larry Brown, Joe Maddon, Larry Brown and Larry Brown. Tom Thibodeau will probably do it in the next few weeks. Babcock even did it once before, after the NHL lockout ended in 2005, when he jumped from Anaheim to Detroit because he wasn’t confident about his future in Anaheim.The difference here is that Babcock had no reason to leave. He would be the first to say this. The Red Wings still wanted him. Last year, they wanted to make him the highest-paid coach in the NHL. He had stable ownership—the Ilitch family will likely own the Red Wings for as long as Babcock coaches. He had a strong relationship with his general manager, Ken Holland, who is both extremely skilled and as easy to get along with as any executive in sports. Babcock liked living in Michigan, and he admitted to the Detroit Free Press recently that it would be “way easier for my family” if he stayed. The Wings are even building a new arena.There was no reason for Babcock to leave. And yet he left."
Job stability. Good working relationship with your boss. Great location. New arena on the way. I can think of a lot of coaches who wished they had what Mike Babcock enjoyed as the coach of the Detroit Red Wings.
Rosenberg will tell you that Babcock’s choosing Toronto was more about accepting a great challenge than it was about the money (although Rosenberg will also tell you that it was okay to leave for the money, too). I’m not so sure it wasn’t about the money – seems to me he had a challenge on his hands with Detroit – but I have learned to stop judging people without facts, so I’ll let that theory be the one we work with today.
Still, the precedent that Babcock has established irks me. What is to stop Bruce Boudreau, for example, from courting other suitors, if only to drive up Anaheim’s offer should they decide they wish to retain him once his contract is up? Nothing – this is about to become the new norm, and not every coach will test the waters out of some innate drive to seek out new challenges.
More from Ducks News
- Who could the Anaheim Ducks consider presenting offer sheets to?
- Is Pierre-Luc Dubois on the cards for the rebuilding Anaheim Ducks?
- Making the case for the Anaheim Ducks to trade with the Edmonton Oilers
- Anaheim Ducks might benefit tremendously by trading John Gibson
- How close are the Anaheim Ducks to becoming contenders again?
Money talk$ and now coaches walk because of it.
Which brings me to the dollar amount of Babcock’s new job. I’m not here to argue over who is worth more, the players or the coaches. Whether it is fair or not, professional athletes will always be worth more than their coaches. Babcock’s contract may pale in comparison to the salaries thrown out to the league’s elite players, but $50 million over eight years for a coach? The highest paid coach in the league up until this was Joel Quenneville, who was making around $2.75 million annually.
I understand that NHL coaches make less money than their peers in the NFL, NBA, and MLB, and that Babcock was looking to help out his fellow coaches:
One of his stated goals was to help raise coaching salaries league-wide. Consider the landscape changed. https://t.co/l1oXuFNZYW
— Matt (@Mattrick_Swayze) May 20, 2015
Going from one extreme – under paid, which is in itself a phrase I hate to use when most people will never sniff the amount of money Mike Babcock was making in Detroit – to the other in one move, though, is a case of too much, too soon. Detroit was willing to pay Babcock $4 million a year, which would have easily made Babcock the highest-paid coach in the league. Such a salary would have been an acceptable step in raising salaries league-wide.
Paying him an average of $6.25 a year is not, and the scary thing is that we don’t know how high the Leafs would have gone had Detroit attempted to match this offer. Thank goodness Detroit had the fiscal sense to stand down, but if Toronto was willing to go nuclear, I’m sure there are other franchises willing to follow.
My opinion doesn’t amount to much, but the world of professional sports is already full of over-priced free agents and salaries that approach embarrassing. Do we really want the same type of feeding frenzy for coaches that we have with players?
Because ready or not, here it comes!