No. 107: SHELDON KEEFE / “A lot of people think I don’t deserve a chance and want me to fail," Keefe told me before his debut as an OHL coach. "I’m just asking them to give me a chance.”
I labelled my story "From Coach Killer to Coach" in 2012. Embittered Leafs fans might tag him as Coach to the Coach Killers these days. A look back at Kyle Dubas's hiring Keefe in the Soo.
THOUGH THE LEAFS managed to make the second round of the NHL playoffs for the first time in a generation, their coach Sheldon Keefe has been twisting in the wind these last ten days or so. Well, since Friday, when team president Brendan Shanahan made it official that Kyle Dubas was out as GM, “twisting in the wind” doesn’t cover it. That’s like saying that Dorothy’s house was twisting in the wind in The Wizard of Oz. Hard to see how Keefe survives with a new GM.
All winter Toronto fans talked about what would constitute a successful season for the team. Would knocking off a Tampa Bay team with Stanley Cup pedigree be enough? Or pushing the Bruins, dominant all season long, to the wall in the second round? Reasonable people could disagree and so could citizens of Leafs Nation. What was clear, however, a second-round elimination by the Florida Panthers didn’t qualify as progress, not that even “progress” in Year Seven of the Matthews-Marner-Nylander-Rielly iteration would be enough. The …
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