Say this for the Toronto Maple Leafs: They may be confusing, but at least they are consistently confusing.
Toronto began its offseason by hiring a disgraced former general manager and a franchise legend with no hockey management experience to work alongside him. Then, on Tuesday, the organization traded its best goaltending asset for one of the league's worst goaltenders (plus cap space!). And finally, the Maple Leafs announced their new head coach Wednesday, settling on the guy who couldn't get the Los Angeles Kings out of the first round of the playoffs.
New Maple Leafs GM John Chayka told reporters Tuesday that his extensive coaching search had included discussions with 55 candidates. Those people, somewhat confusingly, reportedly covered a wide range of possibilities: everyone from the completely untested (Joe Pavelski) and the college standouts (David Carle) to predictable veterans (Peter Laviolette) and one very unpredictable veteran (Patrick Roy).
The hilariously large number of contenders makes one wonder if Chayka assumed he would determine the type of coach he wanted by simply talking to enough of them.
The answer eventually came: Jim Hiller, a former Maple Leafs assistant whom the Kings fired in March after three seasons at the helm.
It's a surprising hire if only because it seems so routine - yet another guy grabbed from the pile of recently discarded coaches. It's the type of move that raises suspicions about some secret rule requiring team executives to prioritize men who have done the job before, regardless of effectiveness.
Upon hiring Chayka in May, MLSE president Keith Pelley touted him as a data-driven, outside-the-box figure who would apply new ways of thinking in building a competitive hockey team. Pelley's response to widespread skepticism of his new hockey operations team was: Just you watch. These guys are about to reimagine how to construct a Stanley Cup contender.
Then the organization went and picked a perfectly unremarkable coach.
We're now at the point of the story where it's important to note that a boring new coach could be what the Maple Leafs need. They were bad under former bench boss Craig Berube two years ago - but got bailed out by good goaltending - and then bottomed out this season for a host of reasons. They were consistently outshot and out-chanced during his tenure, and given that the point of the Berube hire was to make Toronto tougher to play against, the situation became an unworkable mess.
Hiller, at least, led Kings teams that touted positive underlying numbers in terms of shot generation and expected goals. Plus, they were defensively sound, even remaining so this season until he ultimately got the boot.
Could a coach who's better able to tighten up Toronto's defensive play make a significant difference in the team's overall success? It's at least possible.
But shoring up the Maple Leafs' back end is exactly what Berube was brought in to do, back when former GM Brad Treliving had decided that the skill-first team assembled by his predecessor needed to get bigger (and slower).
Many expected Chayka to go in the other direction with an emphasis on speed and skill, taking advantage of the club's talented forwards and the one it's likely to add with the first overall pick in the upcoming draft.
Hiller, though, doesn't seem like someone you'd hire to establish dynamic offensive play. Toronto went out looking for a Ferrari and came home with a Volvo station wagon.
Then again, maybe Hiller's style of play can simply be attributed to the hand he was dealt in Los Angeles. Perhaps the 57-year-old former NHL player just needs a chance to shape a talented, attack-minded lineup into a progressive, dangerous team similar to the one that just won the Cup in Carolina.
He's familiar with the Leafs, too, having coached stars such as Auston Matthews and William Nylander as an assistant on Mike Babcock's staff. (Readers can decide for themselves whether hiring someone who makes Matthews and Nylander comfortable should have been on Chayka's list of requirements.)
But mostly, it just seems odd that it took so long to reach this point. What to make of all the no-stone-unturned talk? If the end result of Chayka's grand odyssey was to hire a recently fired coach who previously served as a Maple Leafs assistant, he could have saved himself a lot of trouble and wrapped this up several weeks ago.
It's hard to put much stock into a seemingly unconventional search when it results in such a conventional choice.
Scott Stinson is a contributing writer for theScore.
