CALGARY – Former Toronto Maple Leafs forward Nazem Kadri’s book “Dreamer: My Life On The Edge” is about how head coach Mike Babcock treated his players.
Kadri’s book, scheduled for release October 15, says Babcock told Maple Leafs forward Mitch Marner during his rookie season in 2016-17 to make a list of his teammates by ranking their work ethic from best to worst.
Marner confirmed the incident in 2019 after the Maple Leafs fired Babcock.
Kadri, who played for Toronto for a decade, said in his book that he and teammate Tyler Bozak “stormed Babcock’s office and confronted him.”
“He tried to defend what he had done, to explain the thought process behind the exercise,” Kadri recalls in his book.
“There wasn’t much to say, and in the end I think he realized he had made a mistake. He then apologized to Mitch. We had pretty much convinced him.
“You don’t do that to a rookie. »
Babcock, who led Canada to Olympic gold in 2010 and 2014 and the Detroit Red Wings to a Stanley Cup in 2008, was behind Toronto’s bench from 2015 until he was fired early in the 2019-2020 season.
Kadri, who is in his third season with the Calgary Flames, wrote that he and Babcock had a “pretty good relationship and I think he realized early on that I wasn’t a player he could intimidate “, and also that Babcock made him a better player.
But he disagreed with some of Babcock’s tactics at the time. Kadri wrote that Babcock asked Toronto’s strength and conditioning coaches to rank players based on their effort level in the gym and spoke about those evaluations, player by player, in front of the entire team.
“The aim was to embarrass the players and this resulted in awkward conversations between the players and the coaching staff,” Kadri wrote.
“Once trust is broken, it’s hard to go back. »
After his firing by the Maple Leafs, Babcock was hired as head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2023.
He resigned after two months on the job and before the start of the season, after it was revealed he had asked to see players’ personal photos on their cellphones in order to get to know them better.
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