This Post Is Just OK

You may have seen the recent to-do in which Maple Leafs coach Randy Carlyle dammed goalie James Reimer with faint praise in a post-game interview. That lead to much discussion in the media about the coach not having confidence in his goalie.  This seems to have coincided with the start of a slump by Reimer, which is bad for a team that typically gives up a lot of shots.

That leads me to wonder how is it that coaches are so bad at dealing with the Toronto media. It's no secret that:

• Canadians are obsessed with hockey.
• Toronto is obsessed with itself
• Toronto has many media outlets

You can add to that the fact that Leaf fans have an ugly tradition of singling out one player to blame for the team's troubles, however obvious it may be that the whole team is playing bad. Carlyle has to know that if he makes a remark that even hints at being unsatisfied with the goaltending it will set that as the topic for the next week throughout the city.

He has, of course, gone through the traditional blaming the reporters for what's happening. I don't want to sound like I'm letting the media off scot-free here: they are obsessive and simplistic. But when the coach knows this is going to happen, he has to take some blame too. Yet Toronto coaches continually make this mistake. It's like they're too stubborn to acknowledge that they can't control the media. Too bad it's the players who keep paying the price.

That brings me to another theory of mine as to why Canadian teams never win the Stanley Cup. We have rather specific ideas about what a winning hockey team looks like, and our teams tend to get built according to that vision. Vancouver is another good example. As a team built on skilled forwards and a laid-back goalie, we always diagnosed them as too soft. So the team tries to compensate by hiring a combative, butt-kicking coach, ignoring the fact that his style doesn't fit the team's talent. Toronto keeps hiring tough-talking coaches and can't figure out why their youngsters and goalies never develop.  Silly as it sounds, coaches should take some courses in Public Relations.