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Mike Check - Sept. 18, 2023 – Vol. 77, Issue 03 - Ken Campbell

WHEN SHANNON Chinn took over as the chief athletic officer at the University of Saskatchewan in June of 2021, she suddenly found herself overseeing 15 varsity teams, with 15 coaches, a group of men and women who didn’t get to their positions without having healthy egos. The first one to reach out to her was the first-year volunteer coach of the men’s hockey team. Chinn obviously had not hired him, but she knew exactly who he was. Everyone did.

It’s not easy being anonymous when your name is Mike Babcock and it’s the summer of 2021. It was probably even harder, at that point, for Babcock to be able to convince people he could play nicely in the sandbox with others. “Basically, what he said to me was, ‘Hey, you’re the boss,’ ” Chinn said. “ ‘You tell me where to be and when to be there.’ We had a great time working together.”

Two summers later, Babcock was on the phone, waiting for his flight from the John Glenn Columbus International Airport back to Saskatoon for a fundraiser for that same hockey team. Among other things, Babcock helped spearhead something called the men’s hockey excellence fund, which has raised almost a million bucks for the program already. Like Babcock’s return to the NHL after an almost four-year exile, it was not a direct flight. After three seasons in the depths of the Metropolitan Division, the Columbus Blue Jackets are counting on Babcock to shepherd a young roster busted beyond repair last season back to the playoffs. After all, grabbing a hard-ass out of the coaches recycling bin worked the last time they did it with John Tortorella, so why not try again?

The Blue Jackets will undoubtedly be getting a kinder, gentler Babcock than the one who was dismissed by the Toronto Maple Leafs in November 2019, but he’s also a relatively unrepentant one. No one sits out that long without learning something or coming back to the game with an improved perspective. Whether Babcock is actually on a mission for redemption after allegations from former players of psychological abuse is open to conjecture. You get the sense he doesn’t see it that way, insisting the stories involving former players such as Johan Franzen of the Detroit Red Wings and Mitch Marner of the Maple Leafs were overblown. (For the record, Babcock reached out to Franzen, who said after Babcock’s firing that Babcock was “a bully” and “a terrible person, the worst I ever met.” He did not hear back.)

“Have I ever done anything wrong or said anything wrong?” said Babcock, 60. “A hundred percent. Have I ever crossed the line? Yes. Have I ever said anything to my wife that I would like to get back? A hundred percent. But you can’t be in the game as long as I have, and have all those players, and have managers wanting to hire you and keep you, then suddenly you’re not a good person? Something doesn’t pass the smell test. Do I need to be better? A hundred percent.”

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It’s probably a good time to remind people that none of this led to his firing by the Leafs. These allegations all came out after the fact. In reality, Babcock was fired for the same reason all coaches are fired – his team was underperforming and was not responding to his methods. At the time, the Leafs had a preferred coach-in-waiting in Sheldon Keefe and, unlike some other organizations, could afford to pay Babcock roughly $25 million to not coach them. When those payments stopped coming after last season, despite claiming that he was done coaching for good, Babcock signed with Columbus and will rebuild his reputation while trying to push the Blue Jackets forward.

Which brings us back to the University of Saskatchewan. Babcock spent just one season there because it got him back in the game and allowed him to work with his son, Mike Babcock III, who was an assistant coach. On the ice, the Huskies posted a 13-7-0 record under Babcock and lost in the first round of the playoffs, the kind of season the Blue Jackets would welcome in 2023-24. Babcock has a farm seven miles outside of Saskatoon, and he would go there to hunt during the fall. If he wanted to drop in on his sister for a Sunday night dinner, he was free to do that, too. (Full disclosure: The Hockey News reached out to three players who played under Babcock at the University of Saskatchewan and all three declined to speak about their time playing for him, either positively or negatively.) Meanwhile, Chinn said Babcock was all-in from the start, both at and away from the rink. He took part in all the meetings, always reminded her to remember the business side and was a willing and eager participant in the program’s diversity and inclusion efforts.

“You need a mental-health expert? You’ve got one on campus,” Babcock said. “You need a communications expert? You’ve got someone on campus. You need someone to evaluate the way you talk? You’ve got someone on campus. There was a lady named Liz Duret (a senior diversity and inclusion consultant at the university). The way she talked to people and the way she talked to me, I loved it. ‘You can’t say that. You can’t talk like that.’ It was unbelievable.”

As far as anyone was concerned, including the man himself, Babcock was out of the game for good. Babcock always told Jarrett Deuling, a former opponent in the WHL and AHL, that if he were ever fired, he would come to the Yukon to hunt caribou with him. Then he went 19 years without ever getting fired. The former New York Islanders farmhand is a hunting guide, and Deuling was one of the first people to call Babcock after Toronto fired him, reminding him of his promise. The rest of that fall, Babcock wandered around Canada’s North bow-hunting big game. For a couple of months in the winter, Babcock would go to Palm Springs, Calif., where one of his neighbors happens to be former Dallas Stars coach and soon-to-be Hall of Famer Ken Hitchcock. The two golfed together every day, and Hitchcock, who was a golf pro in a previous life, was amazed at how dramatically Babcock had improved, to the point where he was shooting between 80 and 90.

“He attacked golf like he attacked hockey,” Hitchcock said. “He got to be a really good player. He was really grinding and working at it. He had no interest in coaching. He was done. He had found other things in life he enjoyed, and one of them was the two of us clowns hitting balls and trying to play golf.”

For his part, Babcock thinks he’s still terrible at golf, but he wants to get better at it so he can have a sport to play in his senior years. He would still rather be water-skiing or hunting, things his firing afforded him the time to do. But it was more than that for Babcock. Losing his job was an opportunity for a reset, one Babcock didn’t think he needed, but one he was actually grateful to have.

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“The last three-and-a-half years have been a gift from God,” Babcock said. “I’ve loved it that much. It’s been unbelievable. I could have never imagined how great it was being around my kids and being involved in their lives way more. We just enjoyed our lives, we really did.”

But then in January, the Ottawa Senators learned that assistant coach Bob Jones had been diagnosed with ALS, and while Jones continued in his duties, Senators coach D.J. Smith brought Mike Babcock III in for the final quarter of the season. (The younger Babcock has since been hired as a skills coach by the St. Louis Blues.) It was then that the elder Babcock got the juices flowing again, breaking down games with his son and watching more games. It wasn’t long before he and Hitchcock were talking about him getting back behind the bench. “I saw a whole different passion in him,” Hitchcock said. “I saw the teacher in him come out because he was helping his son understand things. He was getting excited about watching hockey again, and I knew it had changed for him. When I listened to the conversations he was having with his son, it felt very much like when we were together on the Olympic teams. You could see the passion, you could see the attention to detail, you could see everything. I knew the passion had come back.”

HAVE I EVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG OR SAID ANYTHING WRONG? A HUNDRED PERCENT. HAVE I EVER CROSSED THE LINE? YES– MIKE BABCOCK

The last time Babcock took a coaching job with a young, developing team, one of the first things he said was, “there’s going to be pain.” The Blue Jackets have already flirted with getting the first-overall pick, and there’s a sense that better days are ahead. They have an enviable group of young players and prospects, led by 21-goal scorer Kirill Marchenko, slick center Kent Johnson and Adam Fantilli, the man-boy who was picked third overall after winning the Hobey Baker Award with the University of Michigan last season. David Jiricek, a stud defenseman who was taken sixth overall in 2022, is also on the way. A healthy Zach Werenski, along with additions Damon Severson and Ivan Provorov, will help a defense corps that was obliterated by injuries last season.

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Still, the Blue Jackets will have to claw their way into playoff contention in an ultra-competitive Metro Division and Eastern Conference. In fact, it would be a major surprise if the Blue Jackets made the playoffs in 2023-24, even with the additions to their lineup. There will be a lot of time to figure out whether Patrik Laine is indeed a center and, if he is, whether he can be the guy who fills the gaping chasm that has existed for this franchise at that position. As good as Fantilli is, he’s a teenager, and it normally requires some adjustment time for guys that size to get up to speed in the best league in the world. At pretty much the same age, Joe Thornton had three goals as an NHL rookie. Mark Messier had one. In the WHA.

So, there are no miracles being expected here, despite Babcock’s pedigree. When the Blue Jackets came to Hitchcock asking for suggestions on who to hire to replace Brad Larsen, he gave them only one name, fully confident Babcock could be a positive influence on this group. There’s no statute of limitations for a coach to be out of the game for what Babcock did. There are a lot of people who are convinced that Babcock has served his time and should be given a second chance. Some others believe there is no redemption to be had, and he should never coach again. There are parts of the game that will still be non-negotiable for Babcock, and those looking for him to be apologetic will be disappointed.

“What I do know is that the combination of stress and pressure impacts people in a very negative way,” Hitchcock said. “And when you’re in that atmosphere, it can sometimes be overwhelming, and you can say things you don’t really mean, and the message doesn’t come out the right way. But I know this man as well or better than anybody in the world because I’ve seen him under unbelievable pressure, and I’ve seen how clear and concise and composed he is. I don’t know what went on because, by design, we didn’t talk about it. I’m excited for Mike and Columbus, because I think he’s going to do a hell of a job, and the players are going to learn a lot from him.”

Babcock spoke to three teams in the off-season and settled on Columbus for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it is an hour and 45 minutes away from his home in Michigan and 90 minutes from some very good hunting spots he owns in Ohio. “We’ve had a lot of injuries over the past couple of years, and we’ve got to get that sorted out,” Babcock said. “We haven’t finished high in the standings, so we’ve got to get that sorted out. When I started (coaching), I knew nothing. I knew that if you had fun and played hard, you could win, and we did. I want to have as much fun as I can possibly have and help the team get better.”

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