No. 169: MIKE BABCOCK / The world juniors are showcases for teens making debuts on the big stage. Back in '97, the coach of a nondescript Canadian team had his own breakout moment (if you asked him).

Babcock never thought coaching in Spokane was small time. He presumed his own greatness waiting for the world to catch up.

Mike Babcock at some point in his 15 minutes as the putative coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets.

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THE line I often invoke about Mike Babcock goes directly to ego and his vision of his place in the universe :

“He thinks fans spend $500 for a chance to watch him coach.”

It’s decent as far as it goes, but it’s hard to compete with his own self-assessment. Who can forget this moment of the defiance when, as they say, the ship be sinking? (The exact circumstances were a five-game losing streak with a game upcoming in Vegas back in November of 2019 and a pink slip imminent.)

Suffice it to say he did not cash in the bet that he’d win that Jack Adams that season.

I always find it grating when anyone speaks of himself/herself/themselves in the third person. With Mike Babcock I just found it amusing. He had no time for false modesty or, in fact, any modesty at all.

Mike Babcock was always one of the top 100 coaches working in hockey and 99 were always trying to figure out why he was the highest paid. Never the best, just the best paid. Yeah, he was behind the bench of two teams that won Olympic golds … it made for a lot of industry envy. A lot could have done exactly as well with the luxury of the talent on the roster. A few of the best would have been as successful and made victory aesthetically more pleasing and probably more decisive.

One line I heard from a former GM really landed for me when he signed with Toronto what seems like a long time ago:

“Babcock won one Stanley Cup in Detroit with a great team in 2008 and then lost the Cup the next year with a better team.”

Ask sportswriters to nominate a career-defining moment for Babcock and they’ll point to the 2008 Cup or the Olympics. Not for me, though. No, the ultimate Mike Babcock moment was when he scratched Jason Spezza for the Leaf’s opener after the veteran signed a minimum deal to play for his hometown team and serve as a mentor for emerging talents in the line-up. Everyone piled on that one. (Check out this link for the full litany.)

The telling bit of forgotten history came courtesy of Craig Button, a friend of How to Succeed in Sportswriring (without Really Trying): Babcock had been Mike Modano's head coach when the future Hall of Famer was a healthy scratch in the final game of 2010-11 season that would have been his 1,500th game. It was final go-round for Modano who, like Spezza, had come back to his hometown for a swan song.

Babcock rhymes with “bad cop” and the term is usually applied to a coach who comes in to deliver the bad news and get tough with an underperforming team. Babcock felt he had to make “statements” just to get attention—let’s watch him coach, let’s marvel at his genius.

(Amazing personal sidenote: I was actually approached by a publisher about ghostwriting a business book to be “authored” by Babcock. Thankfully, that book never materialized. It’s hard to imagine the culture of business being worse than it is, but a management manual from Babcock might have made it even more toxic.)

Ah, funny how a guy who beat up on his own players is so easy to beat up on when you sit down at the keyboard. I find it theraputic just to type these shots across his bow.

People will ask me if Babcock was always this way and I can safely say, “Indeed he was.”

I first encountered Babcock at the 1997 world junior tournament in Geneva. He was in his third year behind the bench of the Spokane Chiefs, but was an easy choice for Hockey Canada, which was always on the lookout for emerging coaches. Spokane had a great run in the 1995-96 season, losing just 18 of 72 games and making the WHL final with, in retrospect, nearly zero star talent.

The world junior job was a plum assignment, a real resume sweetener and a virtual assurance of a move up hockey’s food chain (so long as you won). This was clearly how Babcock saw this unfolding.

Babcock was an off-putting guy—he felt like we in the media didn’t understand his work and it was beyond our limited ken. Yeah, it really was rocket science in his mind. Fine.

I do remember Babcock asking us about the newspapers we were working for. I was at the Globe and Mail and Damien Cox was at the Toronto Star. He wanted to know the circulation of our papers. Weird, I thought, but maybe a conversation starter. No, he wanted to have an idea to what degree we were getting his name out there. He also suggested that he was used to the big time, remarking that the Spokane Spokesman-Review had a circulation of 150,000. We suggested that his estimated number might be a bit high given that the population of the burgh was under a quarter million. (Even 70,000 would have been high.) Yeah, he was working in Spokane … and big-footing us.

If Babcock wasn’t over-coaching the team in fact, he was in his post-game analysis. To the point up in the lead—he seemed to believe that hockey was a game that was coached, not played.

He did get caught with a significant body part in a wringer in the final against the U.S. at one juncture—all coaches match lines and Babcock, a self-styled grandmaster of the practice, had a bunch of players milling around on the ice on line changes. Canada didn’t have the last change, so he was trying to muddle things, having seven or eight skaters milling around in the interim, and wait out the opposing coach. The ref had quite enough of it and at an important juncture of the game, a one-goal Canadian lead with a defensive-zone face-off, he sent off two of the three defensemen who were on the ice. Babcock somehow wound up with four forwards on the ice with a face-off in the Canadian end—Alyn McCauley, Canada’s best player in that tournament and a great two-way centre, wound up having to take a shift as a defenceman.

The Canadian kids got out of the jam the coach had put them in and it was bygones-being-bygones when they played the anthem. But it would have been bad press—no matter what the circulation—if Babcock’s too-cute-by-half had cost the team.

(See a previous SubStack entry, No. 114: ALYN McCAULEY / For whom the bell gets rung. A trial or paid subscription is required.)

After the final, I wrote about Babcock and the two Giants players from Saskatchewan, Trent Whitfield and Hugh Hamilton, whom he had brought with him to Geneva, neither of them anything remotely like a star or, for that matter, a prospect. In retrospect, I didn’t express sufficient explicit doubt when Babcock suggested that he had nothing to do with the inclusion of the pair on the roster—I let the readers (whatever their numbers) figure that out themselves.

With that tournament, Babcock’s career took flight. For reasons I can’t determine he was Hockey Canada’s favourite son. Even when he moved on to the pros, first in the minors, then in Anaheim and Detroit, he was the featured guest speaker at every summer coaching clinic the outfit sponsored and staged—looking back now, he was positioning himself and ingratiating the influencers in the organization.

It was a hell of an act and a lot of people bought. No more.

To whatever extent my story enabled his rise, I sincerely apologize.

Below the paywall, find the story I wrote about Babcock, Whitfield and Hamilton. I truly wanted to emphasize Whitfield and Hamilton, for whom the tournament was their one shining moment rather than a foundation line on a CV.

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GENEVA -- CANADA's 2-0 triumph over the United States in the final of the world junior hockey championship on Saturday was a victory of the expected and the unexpected.