Toronto Maple Leafs' Randy Carlyle Earned His Firing

The Toronto Maple Leafs fired head coach Randy Carlyle on Tuesday, according to the team's official Twitter account:

Many NHL coaches are fired too early, because it’s an easy thing to do in a salary-cap world where making a midseason trade requires Herculean effort. That isn’t the case for the Maple Leafs, who managed the twin feats of not only giving Carlyle plenty of rope but also of firing him while the team’s 2014-15 season is still salvageable.

This wasn't a move that came out of the clear blue sky, either. The Leafs have been in a terrible funk lately, losing seven of their last nine games. On Saturday, the club fell 5-1 to the Winnipeg Jets; the team was crushed 40-21 on the shot clock and outplayed throughout the contest. Teams that endure elongated losing streaks tend to make moves, particularly if they have legitimate playoff aspirations.

Given Carlyle’s checkered history with the team, he likely would have been in the crosshairs of management anyway, but he probably didn’t help his case by taking thinly veiled shots at the men above him in the organization following that loss. Via the Toronto Star’s Dave Feschuk:

"

You don’t always have the luxury to say that you’d like this player or that player or this type of player. That’s not the way it works. How it works is you have an organization that provides you with players, and our job, as we’ve said all along, is just to coach ’em up.

"

It’s a pretty incredible comment from a coach in Carlyle’s position, and it must have made the decision to fire him even easier.

It’s one thing for the team to struggle on the ice in the short term, and it’s worse if those struggles follow a track record of indifferent performance stretching back several years. But when a coach starts emphasizing the gap between himself and the management group above him—particularly when that same management group has seen massive turnover since his hiring—he’s all but asking to be dismissed.

Graig Abel/Getty Images

It's especially damning given how hard the organization worked to make the coach happy. After the organization re-signed Tyler Bozak and added David Clarkson, the National Post went so far as to say it seemed like the head coach was pulling the strings on player movement.

"[General manager Dave Nonis's] job has been to get Carlyle players who can play the type of hockey the coach advocates," wrote Michael Traikos two summers ago. "Players who are gritty, rougher around the edges and, to steal a word from Brian Burke, truculent. This summer, the GM has done just that."  

Carlyle probably should have been fired in the summer of 2014, following an ugly season in which the Leafs collapsed down the stretch after living on unsustainable percentages in the early going.

Instead, Toronto’s management settled for a compromise; it fired Carlyle’s assistants and gave him a two-year extension. In the world of NHL coaches, that two-year extension was a warning in and of itself; the team wasn’t giving him a one-year kiss of death, but it wasn’t committing itself long-term, either.   

Never a good possession team under Carlyle, the Leafs had flat-lined of late. Over that nine-game run, Toronto had generated just 320 shot attempts at even strength as opposed to the opposition’s 457, meaning that only 41.2 percent of the Corsi events in an average game were positive ones. Only the Buffalo Sabres have posted a worse Corsi number this season.

Carlyle was given a second chance to get the Leafs moving in the right direction in 2014-15; not only could he not get the job done, but he started pointing fingers at the men who had given him that opportunity.

He deserved dismissal.   

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com and war-on-ice.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.