Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Mike Babcock At His Best

04/13/2017 at 8:42am EDT

from Alex Prewitt of Sports Illustrated,

Twenty-four years ago, a jut-jawed young man followed these same roads into town, accompanied by his wife and newborn daughter. He bought a brand-new house across Whoop-Up Drive, not far from the local rink where he had accepted a job to revive the University of Lethbridge Pronghorns men’s hockey team. Early on, the decision looked disastrous. One night in Sept. 1994, not long after the family arrived, a 30-year-old Mike Babcock came home from the first preseason meeting and declared, “This might be the last time I ever coach.”

It seems ridiculous, of course, imagining a world in which Babcock never stalked and glowered behind NHL benches for 1,114 games and almost 600 victories; never won two Olympic gold medals and the 2016 World Cup of Hockey while helming Team Canada; never lifted the 2008 Stanley Cup with the Red Wings. Soon he’ll likely finish as a Jack Adams Trophy finalist too, if not its eventual winner, for steering a rookie-laden Toronto Maple Leafs roster from 30th place last season to the Eastern Conference’s eighth seed this spring—the first worst-to-playoffs reversal since Philadelphia in 2007-08. But in thinking his coaching career might’ve reached an early end, Babcock was gravely serious. This makes what actually happened that much more magical.

Over the next seven months, Babcock engineered perhaps the unlikeliest success story in Canadian college hockey history. It was a season deserving of a Disney film—provided screenwriters could work all the flaming liquor shots and F-bombs into a family friendly script. The championship rings referencing testicular fortitude would probably need some tweaking, too.

By the following summer, one of the smallest schools in the Canadian Interuniversity Athletics Union (enrollment 4,350) had captured its first, and still only, national title; a program had been rescued from extinction; and Babcock was ascending toward the NHL, off from the hitching post toward bigger things. Even now, as the Maple Leafs begin their first-round trial against the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Washington Capitals on Thursday, Babcock traces his proudest accomplishment back to the 1993-94 Lethbridge Pronghorns.

“The best job I’ve ever done,” he says. “By far. Not even close.”

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

From breaking news to in-depth stories around the league, KK Hockey is updated with fresh stories all day long and will bring you the latest news as quickly as possible.

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