Jacques Lemaire Hire Is a Big Win for Mike Babcock, Toronto Maple Leafs

On Friday, the Maple Leafs announced an addition to Mike Babcock’s staff, hiring Jacques Lemaire as Special Assignment Coach.

Most recently, Lemaire had filled that same role for the New Jersey Devils.

This is a fantastic hire for Toronto, for a lot of different reasons.

The most critical of those reasons is that Lemaire is a superb coach. After a playing career that included eight Stanley Cup wins with Montreal, he moved behind the bench. He won the Jack Adams Award twice and enjoyed a head coaching career spanning 1,262 games and including a Stanley Cup win in 1995 with the Devils.

Perhaps most impressive is his work with Minnesota; he guided the expansion Wild to the third round of the playoffs in just their third season and has a career 0.563 points percentage despite spending some tough seasons with the new NHL franchise.

He’s become (in?)famous as the man who popularized the neutral-zone trap at the NHL level. The Devils won the Cup playing it, and the Wild were astonishingly successful for an expansion team using it. New Jersey, in particular, embraced it to such an extent that its identity as a primarily defensive team far outlasted Lemaire’s tenure as coach.

Part of the reason New Jersey retained its defensive reputation in the years it didn’t have Lemaire was because of general manager Lou Lamoriello, who now holds the same role in Toronto. Lemaire brings a long working relationship with Lamoriello to the table, which should help establish a good working relationship between the coach and the manager.

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Lemaire also has ties to Babcock, and despite his past with Lemaire it’s a cinch that he wouldn’t be on Babcock’s staff if the highly regarded head coach didn’t have a place for him. In the Leafs’ official release, Babcock took responsibility for the decision to hire Lemaire:

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Obviously Jacques Lemaire has a wealth of experience. We had a great relationship from the 2010 Olympics and I’ve asked him to join our staff to help me and the rest of our coaches within the entire organization be the best they can be.

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On paper, Lemaire looks a perfect candidate. He was an excellent player and a better coach. He has ties to both the new coach and the new general manager. But he’s more than a resume; he combines intellect and work ethic in a rare and extremely valuable way.

Perhaps no piece sums up those qualities better than an interview between Lemaire and Michael Farber (then of the Montreal Gazette) in 1981. Lemaire had just wrapped up his playing career, which ended with a stint in Switzerland as a player-coach, and was earning a comparative pittance as an assistant coach with Plattsburgh State College.

Lemaire was asked by Farber how he felt about the general lack of appreciation he got during his playing career, and in hindsight the answer illuminates a big part of the reason why he was such a successful coach:

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I was appreciated… by people who liked my style.  And I was hated by other people.  A group of persons go to the games to see [Guy] Lafleur and [Wayne] Gretzky.  There’s another group that go to see [Chris] Nilan fight.  And there are other people who go to study the game, to see who’s doing his job and who isn’t.  I like to think those people appreciated me.

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There’s another quote in the piece, though, a quote from a young winger named Dave Rattray, who explained what impressed him the most about Lemaire:

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He’s the type of guy who works for everything he’s got… He had come down to watch his kids play and he came out on the ice and helped me set up the nets. He didn’t have to do that. I thanked him, and he said, ‘You don’t have to thank me.’ That’s what impresses me about Jacques Lemaire.

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Lemaire’s done most things in hockey. In addition to coaching and playing, he’s worked in management, spending most of a decade with the Canadiens as an assistant general manager (a role that included running their AHL team). He has both coached and managed at the junior level. Very few men in hockey can compete with his wealth of experience.

Now Toronto has him. His history with Lamoriello and Babcock makes him a natural fit. But even if he wasn’t, there isn’t a team in the league that wouldn’t benefit from having his combination of intelligence, work ethic and experience somewhere in its hierarchy.

Statistics courtesy of hockey-reference.com

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