Craig Berube won the Stanley Cup in 2019 as head coach of the St. Louis Blues. The question for the Maple Leafs, the team that just hired the 58-year-old, is how important will it be to them?
Winning a cup race is obviously a huge accomplishment and one that few coaches, even great ones, are able to achieve. But as history shows, it's unlikely to happen again with another team. It's almost never even underestimated.
It's basically Scotty Bowman, probably the greatest coach of all time, who coached the Montreal, Pittsburgh, and Detroit teams (nine times in total) to the Cup, and a few other coaches in the 1930s and 40s. (Peter Laviolette, who led the Carolina Hurricanes to the Cup in 2006, has a chance to join the club if he can lead the New York Rangers to a championship this spring).
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'He's getting results': What Maple Leafs players can expect from playing under Craig Berube
That doesn't mean Berube can't or won't lead the Leafs to the Cup. However, the rationale for hiring him should go far beyond that. Because history teaches us that past championships are no indicator of future championships for a head coach or for future championships.
The Blues were the second NHL team Berube served as head coach. His first job was in 2013-14, replacing Laviolette as the Flyers' coach for his three games of the season. The team, led by Claude Giroux, Wayne Simmonds and Scott Hartnell, lost to the Rangers in seven games in the first round of the series. A year later, they missed the playoffs and Berube lost his job.
Berube's next opportunity in St. Louis began with a bang as he replaced Mike Yeo in November, spurring a remarkable comeback that ended with the Blues' first Cup game in franchise history.
As far as Berube is concerned, it's hard to say what to make of that cup.Jordan Binnington is of The story of that run that came out of nowhere and stopped the Blues from scoring. Exactly half of St. Louis' wins that postseason came by goals. Their special teams were mediocre, with a 16.3 percent success rate on the power play and 75.4 percent on the penalty kill.
The Blues led all teams in 5-on-5 shooting percentage. They outscored teams by 16 goals at 5-on-5, scoring almost 60 percent of their actual goals but only about 49 percent of their expected goals (a trend that continues).
St. Louis looked poised to repeat the following season. When the 2019-20 season was canceled due to the pandemic, only the Boston Bruins had a better record. When postseason play resumed, the Blues lost to the Canucks in six games.
Alex Pietrangelo left for Las Vegas that offseason. The Blues swept in the first round of the playoffs the following season, but won only one more round the rest of the way under Berube, including a six-game first-round victory over Minnesota in 2022. After a cup run in which the Blues only won one round of the play-offs.
Berube's career playoff winning percentage is 46.6 percent, which ranks 18th among active NHL coaches (just ahead of Sheldon Keefe at 20th).
In all of this, it's hard to ignore the Blues' roster: it has become increasingly weakened (with increased scrutiny on GM Doug Armstrong). Pietrangelo was followed by Ryan O'Reilly, David Perron, Vince Dunn, Jaden Schwartz and Vladimir Tarasenko. Binnington is back on Earth.
The Blues had a top-five power play from 2019 to 2022, but it plummeted as top contributors like Perron, O'Reilly and Tarasenko moved on. When Berube was sacked, the Blues were second-bottom in the league (7 goals in 83 chances) and 22nd the year before.
Under Drew Bannister, who replaced Berube, the team shot nearly 23 percent for the rest of the game.
That would be a bit of a problem for a Leafs team that struggled with its power play last season and in past playoffs.
Is Berube the man to turn things around? Will more talent he had to work with in St. Louis work out in Toronto? So what tricks will he come up with to encourage his star players to score more points on the power play when it matters most? What kind of stars will appear around you?
And then there's the other central element of the Leafs' first-round loss (and other games before that): the penalty kill. And again, the Blues were decent at best – 20th when Berube was sacked and 30th the season before that. They have only finished 12th or higher once, finishing fifth in 2021-22.
Can Berube spark more goals for the Leafs in the postseason? That was clearly a big part of what went down for Keefe's team.
What's strange about Berube's Blues' 2019 run? The quality of chances they created at 5-on-5 was considerable – their 2.16 expected goals per 60 minutes ranked 12th among playoff teams and 29th in the regular season. Dew.
Anyway, blues actually Their 2.58 goals per 60 minutes ranked first among playoff teams.
This was the beginning of a trend that continued throughout Berube's regular season tenure. Time and time again, the Blues scored more points than they should have.
Blues 5-on-5 points (per 60 minutes)
| season | Be expected | actual | difference |
|---|---|---|---|
|
2018-19 |
2.68 |
2.55 |
-0.13 |
|
2019-20 |
2.28 |
2.56 |
0.28 |
|
2020-21 |
1.98 |
2.24 |
0.26 |
|
2021-22 |
2.50 |
3.00 |
0.50 |
|
2022-23 |
2.33 |
2.68 |
0.35 |
|
2023-24 |
2.71 |
2.49 |
-0.22 |
Squeezing down chances feels like an encouraging sign for a Leafs team that often does the opposite when it matters – Score few More than expected.
However, what was a little more disconcerting was that the Blues lost the battle for territory under Berube.
St. Louis ranked 29th in expected goal percentage at about 45 percent when Berube was fired in December. Only the Ducks, Blackhawks and Sharks, teams in the league's rebuilding years, fared worse. They weren't that great before the season, ranking 27th in expected goal percentage at 44.5 percent.
Berube went 5-5 in each of his last three-plus seasons.
Is it tactics, personnel, or a combination of both? Will his regular season performance suffer? Will they do better in the playoffs?
The Leafs are counting on Berube's ability to inspire players, but challenge them in ways that were perhaps too late under Keefe, who replaced Mike Babcock as NHL coach in 2019. It's going to happen. In firing Keefe, Brad general manager Treliving said the team needed a “new voice” and that Berube had a long playing career with more than 1,000 games in addition to more than 500 games off the bench. He said he needed someone on his team.
Berube is likely to bring more spontaneity to the Leafs. Unlike Keefe, who tends to analyze and sometimes overanalyze every decision, Berube likes to play on a hunch.
It remains to be seen how he will adapt to the attention and scrutiny that comes with being the Leafs' head coach. A single comment or misstep can cause a three-day-long flare-up. Or how, or if, the more skilled players on the team would respond to his promptings.
That appears to have been the start of an apparent conflict with young Blues star Jordan Kyrou. Berube wanted better defense from Kyrou.
You don't have to worry about that with Auston Matthews, and Keefe may have done all the heavy lifting on that front with William Nylander.
The team Berube excels at in St. Louis — big and heavy — seems to fit well with the type of team Treliving wants to build. The question is whether that is a good thing or not. Berube is the fifth NHL GM to be hired as a coach by Treliving in the last 10 years.
He and the Leafs are counting on Berube to take him where Keefe couldn't: over the mountains and into that exclusive coaching club.
(Photo: Fred Kfory III/Icon Sportswire, Getty Images)
