Firing Randy Carlyle Is Toronto Maple Leafs' Latest Step Toward True Improvement

The Toronto Maple Leafs are...learning?

The firing of coach Randy Carlyle on Tuesday morning is the latest evidence that the Leafs organization has become sentient, the first step required before any robotic mechanism can rule humankind.

The Leafs have a long way to go—they are still not a good team, no matter who is coaching—but the past six months present evidence that the team is willing to make meaningful changes, something that was absent last season.

It started during the summer, when team president Brendan Shanahan blew into a conch-shaped calculator and assembled an analytics team and hired stats-driven assistant general manager Kyle Dubas. The signings of forwards Mike Santorelli, Daniel Winnik and David Booth showed that Shanahan and his crew were looking for possession players for the bottom six, not face-punchers who brought nothing to the table in their seven minutes of ice time.

Despite the changes, very little...well...changed. 

Through 40 games last season, the Leafs were 19-16-5 and statistically worse than this year’s club. Yet the organization hung its hat on the team being opportunistic, gritty, full of heart and one that simply knew how to win. It ignored the issues and collapsed down the stretch.

Through 40 games this season, the Leafs are 21-16-3 and statistically a little better than last year’s club. But the past 20 games, the Leafs have looked a lot like last year’s club. Shanahan identified this and didn’t wait around for a team that lacked structure to fall apart again in the final three weeks of the season—he acted now.

Period	CF%	FF%	Record
First 20 games	47.2	47.8	10-8-2
Past 20 games	42.0	42.4	11-8-1

Look at the graphic. How many times last season did results defy what was happening on the ice, and how many times did Leafs brass bury their heads in the sand about real problems? This season, despite the records not being all that different in those samples, they didn't wait around for the ship to sink in April. That's encouraging if you're invested in the Leafs.

"Obviously, earlier in the season, we had some pretty good stretches where we thought we were going to be the consistent team we wanted to be," general manager Dave Nonis said to the media in Toronto, "and that hasn't happened and we couldn't wait longer. We felt at this point we needed to make the change."

Sure, the Leafs gave Carlyle a laughable contract extension during the offseason, which was like promising a death row inmate scheduled for execution on Dec. 29 a New Year’s Eve party, but that was more about not giving players an excuse to treat Carlyle like a lame-duck coach.

Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

With Carlyle gone, it’s now the players who don’t have any excuses if they fail to perform.

"The coach takes part of the responsibility; the coach is easy to let go," said Nonis, who has somehow kept his job throughout all this. "That's the easy change to make. We all take some responsibility, players included. We did this to try to improve our group. This isn't throwing in the towel. We feel this team has a chance to do some good things, and today was the first step in trying to put everything back in the direction we need."

The Leafs are a subpar team, but they could be a playoff team. That sounds strange, but remember—16 of 30 teams make the playoffs, which means at least one will be below average. Since eight make it from the East, at least one, probably two, will be inferior compared to one or two Western Conference teams that miss the postseason.

No matter what happens over the rest of this season, it happens with a brutal group of defensemen, led by miscast No. 1 defenseman Dion Phaneuf and featuring slow-footed blueliners Stephane Robidas and Roman Polak and inexperienced mistake machines Jake Gardiner and Morgan Reilly.  

The focus needs to be on improving the Leafs defense; they are allowing 34.4 shots per game, and the only team worse is Buffalo. 

With so much elite scoring talent and a top-notch goaltender in Jonathan Bernier, if the Leafs just can climb to moderately below average defensively, they can be a wild-card team...a wild-card team that gets slaughtered in the first round of the playoffs, but a wild-card team nonetheless. 

This was never going to be a championship season for the Maple Leafs, and it was never going to be a Connor McDavid season, either. The one thing the front office wanted...heck, needed...to see was positive change, no matter how slight. There was some over the first 20 games, but when things reverted to 2013-14 form over the next 20 games, it acted.

It may look like the Leafs are spinning their wheels again, but they are doing the little things that could eventually get them out of the mud.

All statistics via NHL.com, war-on-ice.com and Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com.

Quotes obtained firsthand.

Dave Lozo covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @DaveLozo.