Puck Daddy Power Rankings: All-Maple Leafs edition

[Author's note: Power rankings are usually three things: Bad, wrong, and boring. You typically know just as well as the authors which teams won what games against who and what it all means, so our moving the Red Wings up four spots or whatever really doesn't tell you anything you didn't know. Who's hot, who's not, who cares? For this reason, we're doing a power ranking of things that are usually not teams. You'll see what I mean.] 

9. Randy Carlyle

You had to know this was coming.

The Leafs were bad this season despite hanging on by their fingernails to a playoff spot — and boy doesn't that sound familiar — for a lot of reasons, but most of them can be traced back to ol' Concussion Expert Randy Carlyle.

This was a problem of roster optimization, poor tactics, and not having answers when things went as sideways as they so often did. Remember, the Leafs “got smart” this summer and hired a bunch of people whose job was basically to given Carlyle as little autonomy as possible when it came to putting together a lineup every night, and he still managed to continue pushing this team down to uncharted depths. Remember also that Carlyle and Dave Nonis acknowledged over the summer that whatever system the Leafs had in place for Carlyle's first two years behind the bench wasn't working, and that a new one would be figured out.

Well, it worked for a while, and then it didn't.

(That chart is seriously incredible.)

Carlyle had been the Leafs' coach for about two-and-a-half seasons but it felt like forever. And it cost the Leafs dearly. Not just in terms of wasted years — and oh, how they were wasted — but also squandered assets. They used a compliance buyout on Mikhail Grabovski because Carlyle didn't like how he played, and they let Nikolai Kulemin and Clarke MacArthur walk in free agency.

Under Carlyle, the Leafs were a .535 team, and helped immeasurably in getting to that number by the loser point and shootout. In regulation games, Carlyle coached the Leafs to a 69-78 record, a .469 winning percentage. And that's with his teams having put up a PDO that was tied for second in the league over that time.

After the firing happened, as it inevitably had to, it started to come out that in recent weeks Carlyle had stopped listening to Leafs management in many cases, and I guess that makes sense. They fired his cronies in the front office and all of his assistant coaches and replaced them with nerds who probably tried to tell things like, “Tyler Bozak sucks.” He didn't listen. He was never going to. So he got canned.

And only about eight months too late.

8. Tyler Bozak

Speaking of ol' Bozak, you have to think he's going to be demoted, and fast, from the top line. What the Leafs were running in practice yesterday morning didn't portend such a change, but any smart coach has to figure that a guy who can't even break 50 points in a season — seriously, he's never done it — despite being attached at the hip to a goal machine like Phil Kessel probably shouldn't be your No. 1 center, especially if he's also bad defensively. Which Bozak 100 percent is.

The Leafs are smart these days and they have to realize that they have a better option in this lineup right now to center the top line. Which means that Bozak is about to become a $4.2 million second-line center at best (he's not really even that good) through 2018, unless they can move him.

7. Bad players

None of this, by the way, mentions the biggest anchors in the Leafs' lineup. Over the summer, after the enlightenment in the front office, they did some pretty quick work in addressing the team's appalling lack of depth, but there are still iffy deals all throughout the lineup. Why is Leo Komarov, who's fine I guess, signed through 2018 at $2.95 million? Why is Stephane Robidas making $3 million against the cap until he's 40? Why is Roman Polak making $2.75 million this year and next? Why — and this is the big, big, big one — is David Clarkson making $5.2 million against the cap for last year, this year, and five more after that?

By my count that's $13.9 million going to players who barely belong on an NHL roster or could at least be replaced very, very cheaply.

The Leafs are also doling out cap hits for three different players who aren't on their payroll any more, as well as a cap overage for last season's disaster. Clearly they have an appetite for buyouts and retaining salaries when the need arises, and as far as I'm concerned almost any one of these guys could find themselves traded or bought out in the near future. (At this point, Clarkson's contract is unmovable any way you slice it, no matter how much he sucks.) Which begins to address the team's other major issue:

6. Dave Nonis

Dave Nonis has basically been a terrible GM.

Letting his idiot coach do whatever he wanted over the last three years was offense No. 1, but signing and retaining guys to suit his peculiar, counterproductive needs was a close second. Greg's takedown of Nonis' defense of his own work hit the nail right on the head. This guy has been abysmal and he's built a bloated, expensive, mostly shallow roster that's mediocre when it's playing to the very best of its abilities. But you'd expect nothing but defiance from him.

So no, it isn't entirely on Carlyle that the team has been drizzling turds for three straight years. The firing of Carlyle buys Nonis and the Leafs time, and that's about it. It allows the team to see what Peter Horachek can get out of the same broken roster — he did wonders with Florida last year but oddly wasn't asked back — and to seek an upgrade in the summer whose name rhymes with Like Lablock.

(This, I think, is why Nonis and, more so, Brendan Shanahan extended Carlyle this summer. They knew he wasn't long for the Leafs job, but they sure didn't want to go and get the kind of mediocre talent that was on the market this past summer. Certainly not with Babcock theoretically available in July 2015.)

Until such time, the likelihood that Nonis gets fired as well are probably not very high, but that decision is right around the corner nonetheless. It's coming. It has to. This is a guy who has wholly failed to adapt to the NHL in a satisfactory way, and who needed his hand held by a bunch of “stats guys” with no NHL experience to do something as simple as go out and put together a decent fourth line for less than $4 million.

That's not who you want running the richest team in the league, especially given how intent on turning things around Brendan Shanahan and Kyle Dubas seem to be here.

5. Leafs fans

Well on the one hand you guys got to see the coach whose incompetence has long plagued your psyches thrown out the door. On the other, the future is uncertain and scary. And your team still kinda sucks.

It's a long way back from Hell, and the Leafs have been mired in terrible decision-making at just about every level of the organization for so long that any changes cannot, structurally, be made overnight.

4. The next guy

With that having been said, whomever they hire next is in a bit of a good position here with the Leafs.

The thing is, thanks to a lot of luck this is once again a team on pace for a point total in the mid-90s, and given Horachek's credentials last year I'm not convinced that this season is a complete and total lost cause. Is it going to be tough for the club to hang onto this playoff spot? Sure, but with a good coach it certainly isn't impossible.

Plus, let's say they hire Babcock or Dan Bylsma next summer, or even retain Horachek if they like what they see in the back half of this season. Expectations are probably going to be low. New coach with mostly the same bad roster (the majority of guys whose contracts expire this summer are rookies or useful veterans due a raise), almost certainly a new GM as well. And the thing is, they can't be this bad if the coach has any sort of brain in his head. I'd guess— and there's some math to back it up — that if the team can keep getting roughly this kind of save percentage from Jonathan Bernier, even the loss of a huge shooting percentage can be made up by an actual, meaningful improvement in possession numbers.

This can be a mediocre team with good fundamentals, is the point. And right now mediocrity with a good process behind it — rather than lucked-into mediocrity — probably buys a lot of goodwill from both management and fans. Media? Eh, probably gotta make sure you dress a fighter every once in a while.

3. Jake Gardiner

Another beneficiary of the loss of Carlyle is probably going to be Jake Gardiner, who gets healthy-scratched on occasion and has been a whipping boy in Toronto despite being one of the team's best regular defensemen during Carlyle's tenure. He's certainly been better than Dion Phaneuf.

So now we get to see how a competent coach uses him. Does he still have problems with his game? Sure he does, but he's young enough that you should be able to overlook them in the same way Carlyle and Nonis overlook the other problems carried by more expensive veterans who were, like, “tough” or whatever.

You're finally free, Jake. Maybe now you'll get the minutes you deserve.

2. Nazem Kadri

And you, too, Nazem!

Kadri is one of just four Leafs centers to get more than 800 minutes at 5-on-5 for Carlyle in two-and-a-half seasons (Peter Holland and Jay McClement also made the cut alongside Bozak). And one of only two to crack 1,000, with Bozak obviously being the other one. Which is a crazy number in and of itself.

But more to the point, he's so much better at just about everything than Bozak, in terms of driving play and actually outscoring the opponent. And please recall this is a guy who doesn't get to play with one of the best attacking forces on the planet on his wing.

In fact, Bozak has been a drag on Kessel for years. And hey what do you know, Kessel drives possession better and outscores the competition more often when Carlyle has deigned to put him together with Kadri. But without Kessel, Bozak becomes an absolute dud (27.5 CF%, 37.5 GF%), below replacement level.

There's just no real justification for this to continue, so now is the time for Toronto's new, smart coach to take advantage of this younger, better center's skill and put him alongside an elite offensive talent.

No one's saying this would be the second coming of Backstrom and Ovechkin, but it would almost certainly produce more goals and better underlying numbers than Bozak ever could.

1. Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf (maybe)

So the two guys with the most to gain here, as far as I can tell, are Kessel and the captain Dion Phaneuf. A smart new coach will determine that Bozak sucks, and put Kadri with Kessel. Both will probably see their production increase as a result. All that stuff is interconnected and the ultimate end result is that Kessel probably ends up putting more pucks in the net when he stops playing alongside his not-good roommate.

Likewise, a smart new coach will see Phaneuf as being a No. 2, maybe even a No. 3 defenseman. Despite the contract and the captaincy, this is what he is in terms of actual quality at this point; or rather, that's what he was under Carlyle. Below is Phaneuf's 10-game average for corsi differential per game in every contest since he came to Toronto on Feb. 2, 2010. See if you can guess when Randy Carlyle took over behind the bench:

The Toronto media is obsessed with the guys who are the highest-paid on the team, and so of course Kessel and Phaneuf are bearing the brunt of the blame in the wake of the firing of a coach the ink-stained wretches really did like (because he had the same idiot ideas about the sport as they do). That whole Kessel-called-Dave-Feschuk-an-idiot thing arose because the latter implied that, as the best player on the team, the coach being fired is in some way on him.

This is an outright moronic suggestion, of course, but this is how people in Toronto think. If you get paid the most, it doesn't matter the kind of Herculean effort you turn in every night: It's on you. Kessel is fourth in the league in scoring since Carlyle took over — and again that's playing with the Bozak albatross around his neck — behind Sidney Crosby, Ryan Getzlaf, and Claude Giroux. And ahead of Ovechkin and Backstrom, Patrick Kane, Tyler Seguin, Martin St. Louis, and Jake Voracek, among others. In terms of goals, only Ovechkin, Seguin, and Pavelski have more. The idea that Kessel is “uncoachable” is ludicrous, because let's say he's not listening to the coach: Does he become the best player in the league if he starts? No. So why get on his ass about it?

(This is the same argument dullards make about Ovechkin, but it's funny how No. 8 is back to being fine, and definitively not a selfish coach-killing layabout, now that the goaltending in Washington has sorted itself out. If Ovechkin played absolutely perfect hockey, like mathematically flawless and balletic, how much better could his goals-for percentage really be?)

Now, a smart new coach will probably be able to actually put those players — and the rest of the roster — in more advantageous situations than Carlyle could ever figure out. That, in turn, can make them look more valuable, and also will lead to the team winning more games, which means that while Phaneuf is never going to be actually worth his $7 million freight, he's not going to look like such a glaring disappointment if he can be used correctly. Kessel, who is actually worth $8 million right now, could find himself in a similar position of being relatively unassailable so long as the team is winning and he's scoring.

And boy won't it have to be nice to not have to listen to Steve Simmons' furious, slack-jawed queries every day?

Well, in theory, anyway. In reality, it'll probably become a thing where the team plays well but Kessel has two turnovers and they're after him like ravening wolves again.

(Not ranked this week: Sycophants.

Listening to the somber tones of the Toronto media yesterday eulogizing his career with the Leafs, you'd have thought Kennedy got shot all over again. The guy was a belligerent know-it-all fool who thought concussions happened because your head gets hot, couldn't work a thing where all you have to do is put bread on a conveyor belt and wait three minutes to receive toast, and also happened to be a bottom-five coach in the league. He won three playoff games in three seasons and suffered maybe the biggest Game 7 collapse in the history of the sport. If he didn't dress guys like Colton Orr every night until he was forcibly restrained from doing so, the media would have torn his carcass apart like a pack of crazed hyenas, and they'd have been right to do it.

Phil Kessel can feel free to extend his “idiot” comment to the whole lot of them with very few notable exceptions.)