Maple Leafs finally act decisively instead of passively by firing Craig Berube

The Toronto Maple Leafs announced Wednesday that they had relieved Craig Berube from his duties as head coach. It came off the heels of a disastrous 2025-26 season in which they saw their biggest decline in points ever, falling to fifth-last in the NHL.

Berube’s firing should not come as a surprise to those who were paying close attention to the Leafs throughout his two seasons in charge. His style and tactics were permeated by possessing less of the puck, giving up a lot of scoring chances, relying on the goalies to stop everything, and the offence to be powered by odd-man rushes. It certainly worked during his first year in charge, but the underlying metrics were brutal and it was a warning sign that the way the Leafs had success was unsustainable.

While the Leafs’ struggles this past season do not solely rest on the feet of Berube, he did not do the team any favours in attempting to stop the bleeding when things started going south. It became clear as time went along that he was a man out of answers, made no meaningful adjustments to the lineup or his strategy, and resorted to deflecting blame away from himself. By the end of the regular season, the disconnect between him and the players became too much to ignore and it’s fair to assume that they tuned him out in his final days.

No one should be shocked that Berube was given the axe, but the fact that they did it when conventional wisdom would suggest that he would be given another chance is a breath of fresh air.

For too long, the Leafs franchise has acted cautiously regarding critical decisions that would have major ramifications on the team in the short and long-term. Rather than being proactive in getting ahead on issues that were negatively impacting their chances at success, they sat on their hands and only reacted when it was too obvious that changes needed to be made.

Mike Babcock had clearly overstayed his welcome and the team was playing uninspired by the end of the 2018-19 season. But based primarily on the performance of Game 5 in their 2019 first-round series against the Boston Bruins, he was inexplicably given another chance despite the team falling short yet again. Sure enough, the team struggled out of the gate and it took until November to finally cut bait and replace him with Sheldon Keefe when the season was in jeopardy of being lost.

The Mitch Marner saga also falls into this category. After yet another disappointing playoff loss in 2023, Kyle Dubas alluded to the fact that he was open to moving a significant piece of the core to shake up the foundation and try a different approach. Marner seemed like the prime candidate to be dealt, given his playoff struggles and the fact that he had no trade protection up until July 1st of that year. Instead of capitalizing on a prime opportunity to get maximum value, Brendan Shanahan instead fired Dubas, hired Brad Treliving with the objective not to move anyone from the Core Four, and allowed the no-trade clause to kick in. Sure enough, both Marner and the Leafs got to their wits’ end with each other, and he refused to waive the clause until he was about to become a free agent with the team only being able to get back Nicolas Roy from the Vegas Golden Knights.

There are countless other examples throughout this era of the Leafs where the Leafs’ inability to act swiftly came back to bite them, such as Treliving waiting too long to move on from Keefe as well as Dubas and Shanahan being lame ducks in their respective final seasons. Time after time, the Leafs claimed that they were taking the time to assess the situation and act patiently rather than fall into knee-jerk reactions. Time after time, their prudent approach blew up in their face and they only reacted because a problem became too much to ignore.

You can argue that holding on to both Treliving and Berube for as long as they did would also fall into this category. Given that the former was a tire-kicker who got no business done until the day before the trade deadline while the latter ran out of answers and resorted to blaming everyone but himself, the Leafs let an opportunity to try and salvage the season pass them by and in the end they got burned for it.

While the dismissal of both came far too late, the Leafs acting swiftly upon the arrival of John Chayka and Mats Sundin to move on from Berube is a breath of fresh air. Numerous reporters seemed to suggest that the coach would be given another opportunity under a new regime to prove himself, even though the overwhelming evidence suggested that it would be a colossal error. It would have seen the Leafs fall into the same trap of years past while putting the following season in jeopardy well before Opening Night.

Cutting loose is in the best interest of the Leafs beyond just charting a different course on the overall direction of the team. The new-look front office needed to prove that it could act decisively on significant issues and get ahead of problems before they get worse. Bringing back Berube would have been a bad look for the franchise and would have left people feeling more frustrated with the inaction when he would inevitably be canned months later anyway.

The Leafs are about to enter a new era with a reinvigorated fanbase and renewed optimism in the wake of the team winning the first overall pick. Being proactive instead of reactive further signals that the Leafs will not be operating the same way they did in the previous decade, and it is a refreshing turn of events for fans who longed to see their team do the right thing right away.

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