Coaching the Toronto Maple Leafs can change a person. Decades of playoff futility keep expectations excruciatingly unmet. The constant scrutiny from media and fans is enough to unnerve the confident and harden the affable.
“I don’t know if ‘harden’ is the right word, but it’s an experience,” said Sheldon Keefe, who coached the Leafs from 2019 until May.
Keefe, 44, was fired after Toronto was eliminated in the first round by the Boston Bruins. That ended a five-year tenure defined by considerable regular-season success (.665 points percentage) followed by seemingly inevitable playoff failure. Keefe’s Leafs won just a single playoff round during his tenure. It was his first NHL head-coaching job.
“I started in what many would describe as the most difficult and challenging environment in the league — and many coaches in this league have reminded me of that,” Keefe said. “I leave there forever disappointed in myself that I wasn’t able to help push that team over the line. But I know I’m a better coach, and a better person, having gone through it.”
Keefe took his lumps and learned lessons, which he’s now applying to the New Jersey Devils, who hired him two weeks after he self-published a farewell video to Leafs Nation on social media.
“Sheldon jumped to the top of my list when he became available, and I was thrilled when he agreed to be a part of what we are building here,” Devils general manager Tom Fitzgerald said. “He’s an excellent communicator, believes in collaboration and will take what he has learned previously to make this team a Stanley Cup contender.”
THE DEVILS LOOKED like a Cup contender two seasons ago. They finished with a franchise-best 112 points and then eliminated the rival New York Rangers in seven games before exiting in the second round. They were young and fast and poised for greatness.
And then they absolutely face-planted last season.
The Devils dropped 31 points in the standings to finish seventh in the Metro Division, well outside of a playoff spot. Key players like star center Jack Hughes (who played 62 games) and top defenseman Dougie Hamilton (20 games) lost significant time to injury. Their goaltending ranked 30th in the NHL. Coach Lindy Ruff was fired 61 games into the season, as the Devils were unrecognizable from the aggressive, confident team they were in 2022-23.
Hamilton has been impressed with Keefe.
“I think he’s been great so far, just with how he speaks and what he is trying to teach us and how he’s trying to teach us,” the veteran Devils defenseman said. “There’s a message and it’s very direct.”
Keefe watched the Devils’ implosion from afar.
“The injuries were the obvious thing. But, inevitably, everybody faces injuries and adversity. So if there’s a thing that stood out to me, it was that the team wasn’t able to sustain itself during those times,” Keefe said. “The focus for me has been on what I think has got to be the foundation for any successful team: Everything that you do and everything that you build allows you to push through circumstance and adversity.”
That was a lesson he learned in Toronto. When the Maple Leafs would lose key players like Auston Matthews or Morgan Rielly to injury for extended periods, the team wouldn’t allow it to derail the season.
“We were always able to find ways to grow inside of that and sometimes play even better when we lost people out of our lineup,” Keefe said. “So that’s what I’m looking for in terms of building the structure and consistency here. That the group can sustain itself through hard times and grow through that.”
The Maple Leafs did a lot of growing under Keefe. When he took the bench from Mike Babcock in November 2019, Matthews and Mitch Marner were 22 years old. William Nylander, another member of their core, was 23. That experience made him an obvious fit for what the Devils needed in a new coach. He arrives in New Jersey to find another young core of players like Jack Hughes (23), Luke Hughes (21) and Simon Nemec (20), as well as Jesper Bratt (26) and captain Nico Hischier (26).
The first thing Keefe learned in Toronto while managing a young core? That when you strip away the fame, the contracts and where they were selected in the draft, they’re just hockey players, same as he was for 125 games as an NHL forward.
“If there’s one thing that really stood out to me in the transition from the AHL to the NHL, it was just that there’s more money, more eyes, more fans, all those kinds of things, but they really are just hockey players. Same in lots of ways,” said Keefe, who coached the Leafs’ minor league affiliate for five seasons before taking over in the NHL. “The same way I interacted with players when I was coaching seven years of Junior A hockey in a small town in Pembroke. There’s similarities.”
Building those relationships is essential to one of Keefe’s biggest challenges as Devils coach: holding players accountable.
“We’re all trying to help each other get better and succeed. So that’s our foundation,” he said. “Anything that we say or do, it’s all with the intent of making each other better.”
IN HIS LAST SEASON in Toronto — and perhaps because he sensed it might be his last — Keefe was much more aggressive in disciplining players than he had been previously. He scratched healthy center David Kampf to end the forward’s 323 consecutive games played streak, telling the media he did it to send a message to the rest of the roster.
“The tolerance for the same types of mistakes that are happening is going to be a lot less,” he said.
He benched top players like captain John Tavares and forward Tyler Bertuzzi. At one point, he kept his entire top power-play unit on the bench during a man advantage after it gave up a short-handed breakaway to the Winnipeg Jets.
“It’s on me as a coach to guide the conversation of what’s acceptable, what’s not, what’s cool and what’s not,” Keefe said.
But the coach believes that there’s only so much accountability he can demand as a “bad cop” behind the bench. When he was hired in New Jersey, he laid out his philosophy: The players needed to police themselves.
“It’s integral in building a successful team to have players that are accountable to themselves and ultimately have the group hold one another accountable,” he said.
Things got away from the Devils culturally last season. That led to an infusion of veteran outside voices. Beyond Keefe and his staff, Fitzgerald signed veteran defensemen Brett Pesce and Brenden Dillon, brought back former Devils winger Tomas Tatar and, crucially, added 34-year-old Jacob Markstrom as a solution for their goaltending.
“The more veterans who come in with different experiences, I think that can really help the group. Where teams really grow is when the coach leaves the room,” Keefe said. “That’s really what it’s about. We all respond better to peer pressure than anything else.”
Hischier has been the team’s captain since 2020. Jack Hughes is the team’s biggest star, one still growing as a leader off the ice. It’s reminiscent of the situation Keefe walked into in Toronto: Tavares was the captain and Matthews was the superstar learning how to lead.
“In the early going in Toronto, I can remember talking to Auston about taking steps and being a leader,” Keefe said. “Certainly, his play on the ice dictated what he could do. But at the time, he was like, ‘I’m the youngest guy on the team.’ So he was reluctant. He is super confident, but knew his place.”
Matthews was named the new captain of the Maple Leafs this season, replacing Tavares.
“You could see the natural evolution of him as a leader,” Keefe said. “And every leader has their own style.”
The new Devils coach is still getting to know Jack Hughes, what his leadership style looks like and how to help him develop that part of his game as he did with Matthews.
“You’re trying to make them understand where their opportunities are to speak up or to influence the group. That’s the first thing,” Keefe said. “But you also have to let them be themselves because they have to feel confident and comfortable in who they are. And that takes time.”
KEEFE ALWAYS SEEMED like he was on borrowed time in Toronto. Every playoff failure in Toronto felt like his last one with the Maple Leafs. Even after Keefe was fired, GM Brad Treliving implied the coach shouldn’t shoulder the blame.
“This is a really good coach and an excellent person. The difficulty of this business is that really good people who are good at their job have to be changed,” Treliving said. “This does not fall at his feet.”
The pressure and scrutiny are different in New Jersey. The media scrums are smaller. There aren’t documentary crews filming the team regularly — “We’re in the content era, so you just sort of accepted it as reality,” Keefe said of the intense Leafs coverage.
But the expectations are just as high. Several ESPN pundits expect the Devils to go from outside the playoffs to the top of the Metro Division this season, with their revamped roster and renewed sense of purpose. ESPN BET gives them the fifth-best odds to win the Stanley Cup this season — better than those for Toronto.
“An expectation means that you’ve got great opportunity. It means you’ve got great players. And so I do like that,” Keefe said. “We’ve talked about that the expectations should drive us every day and we should be excited coming here.”
Keefe learned how to process expectations in Toronto. Again, he’ll apply those lessons to New Jersey.
“What you can’t let happen is that, because there’s expectations, that you expect it just happens. It’s incredibly difficult,” he said. “This team didn’t make the playoffs last year. There’s a lot of other teams that didn’t make the playoffs that think they’re playoff teams this year, too. I look at the East this year and I don’t know how you can pick ’em. We’ve got incredible opportunities, we’ve got good players, so now we’ve got to get to work here.”