The Toronto Maple Leafs fired Craig Berube on Wednesday, ending his run as head coach after only two seasons.
John Chayka made the move a week after taking over as the Leafs’ new general manager.
Keith Pelley, the president and CEO of MLSE, had left it up to Chayka to decide Berube’s fate.
“Craig is a tremendous coach and an even better person,” Chayka said in a news release. “This decision is more reflective of an organizational shift and an opportunity for a fresh start than it is an evaluation of Craig. We are grateful for his leadership, professionalism and commitment to the Maple Leafs organization and wish Craig and his family nothing but the best moving forward.”
At locker cleanout day last month, Berube said that he expected to return as head coach.
He had no good case to stick around, though, after his team nosedived out of the playoffs in alarming fashion for the first time in 10 years. His exit comes over a month after Brad Treliving’s dismissal as general manager at the end of March.
Berube had two years remaining on his $4.5 million-per-year deal, which the Leafs are still on the hook for unless Berube gets hired elsewhere.
“This is a bigger-picture decision, and it’s not just about a coach,” Chayka said. “(senior executive adviser of hockey operations) Mats (Sundin) and I have … (been) meeting with everyone from the chefs to talking to some of the players and everything in between, and I just feel like there’s some things that we need to change and do better and be better.”
“We’ll have a thorough process” for the next coach, Chayka said. “It’ll be a wide search. We’ll take our time, try to get it right. It’s the most critical decision as the general manager.”
The 60-year-old Berube never could get the Leafs headed in the right direction in his second season behind the bench. A team that was supposed to challenge for the Stanley Cup and qualify for the playoffs at minimum, instead floundered and flailed near the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings and missed the postseason for the first time since 2016.
The Leafs finished with only 78 points.
All season, under Berube’s lead, they struggled to defend, control the puck and maintain a presence in the offensive zone. The power play was so disastrous in the first half that assistant coach Marc Savard was eventually fired for its failures.
Berube found no solutions and made curious lineup decisions, such as scratching Matias Maccelli and Easton Cowan for extended periods and giving Max Domi the longest look next to Auston Matthews on the team’s top line.
Rather than play David Kämpf when Scott Laughton broke his foot at the end of the preseason, Berube decided to overhaul his entire forward group.
Only the last-place Vancouver Canucks allowed more goals than Berube’s Leafs. No team allowed more shots. The Leafs gave up 2,633 shots — 206 more than the second-worst team.
Things got especially bad coming out of the Olympic break, when the Leafs lost eight in a row for the first time since 2015. It was the stretch that would ultimately bother Berube the most.
It was a dramatic reversal in fortunes for Berube.
Last year, he had the Leafs finding ways to win with Berube Hockey, a heavy brand of game that ultimately required a lot of good fortune: namely, great goaltending and a quick-strike offence, which eventually included an elite power play. The end result in the regular season was the team’s first-ever Atlantic Division title with 108 points.
However, familiar issues returned in the playoffs, and by Day 1 of Year 2, it was clear the Leafs, minus a superstar in Mitch Marner and with no meaningful roster upgrades, were worse. Sluggish and slow and not equipped to thrive in today’s skill-based game.
After not losing more than three games in a row in that first season, the Leafs quickly dropped five in a row in November. They were a mess defensively early on and no longer had elite goaltending to prop things up. A disconnect appeared to arise between the coach and his top players.
“Ask those guys, not me,” Berube said angrily after one loss in December.
Berube’s run in Toronto is over after just 164 games behind the bench, plus another 13 in the playoffs.
It’s the shortest tenure for a Leafs full-time head coach since Paul Maurice, who also lasted 164 games over two seasons.
What went wrong
Berube was in demand when the Leafs hired him on May 17, 2024. He received a four-year contract through the 2027-28 season.
The Leafs management team, headed by president Brendan Shanahan and GM Brad Treliving at the time, was drawn to his straight-talking approach and knack for getting his teams to play a grinding, defensive style they felt was more conducive to delivering success in the playoffs.
Berube was behind the bench when the St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup in 2019, but noted he’d never had the kind of offensively gifted players he was given in Toronto. Still, he vowed to push those at the top of the roster as hard as he would the 23rd man.
“When players aren’t working and they’re not competing, they’re going to have an issue, OK?” Berube said at the outset of his first Leafs training camp. “That’s unacceptable in my opinion.”
His approach yielded immediate results. The Leafs allowed 32 fewer goals during the 2024-25 regular season than they had a year prior under former head coach Sheldon Keefe. Much of that improvement, however, was tied to the fourth-best save percentage in the NHL from the tandem of Anthony Stolarz and Joseph Woll. Though they were sometimes able to limit high-danger shooting opportunities, particularly with their top pair of Jake McCabe and Chris Tanev on the ice, Berube’s Leafs were frequently outshot, outchanced and outpossessed.
Come the playoffs, the Leafs got deeper into the second round than any previous version of the team since Matthews, William Nylander and Marner were drafted. But they were also trounced in Games 5 and 7 by the eventual Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers. While it was a result that left Berube wondering aloud about the “mindset” of his players, he appeared to be on stable ground.
In fact, after Shanahan was fired on May 22, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment president and CEO Keith Pelley called Berube a “wonderful asset” for the organization and intimated that he would take a larger role in decision-making alongside Treliving. The acquisitions of Nicolas Roy and Dakota Joshua that followed in the summer seemed to be made with Berube’s preferred playing style in mind. The Leafs also claimed Sammy Blais off waivers on Oct. 6, bringing in a grinding winger who had a history with Berube while effectively setting the wheels in motion on Kämpf’s departure from the organization.
The net result? The Leafs got slower and less dynamic. The chip-and-chase style that Berube favoured didn’t work. And without elite goaltending, pucks found their way into the Leaf net with alarming regularity.
Berube never could get the team to adjust. The accountability he was supposed to demand never materialized either. It wasn’t until Nov. 28 that Berube finally scratched a struggling Domi. His most frequent public criticisms were aimed at Nylander, the team’s leading scorer.
A debilitating string of injuries played a role in the team’s spiral this season, but Treliving dismissed using those as a valid excuse for why Toronto had stumbled so badly when he met reporters for a quarter-season review on Nov. 18.
He gave Berube a public vote of confidence during that media session.
“Craig didn’t become a bad coach overnight,” said Treliving. “I believe fully in Craig and his messaging. When I talk to the players, too, they believe in it, but there is that disconnect that we’re not doing it. It comes back to the inconsistency.”
Concerningly, he described his team’s play as “vanilla.”
The Leafs beat St. Louis 3-2 in overtime later that night to end a five-game winless skid, but never could right the ship for any prolonged period. It was a miserable November, with Berube repeatedly questioning his team’s effort while being unable to push the buttons needed to reverse course.
Treliving would double down on Berube in the aftermath of Savard’s firing and according to Pelley, never approached ownership about replacing the head coach. But while the power play improved with Steve Sullivan running things, the Leafs had only a brief period of team success.
Eventually, they crumbled.
Where do the Leafs go from here?
The Leafs could have attempted to hire Pete DeBoer, one of the NHL’s most successful coaches, at any point last season. Their inactivity ultimately cost them a chance at DeBoer, who became the New York Islanders head coach late in the season.
The most attractive candidate available now is Bruce Cassidy, who was fired by the Vegas Golden Knights in late March.
Cassidy guided the Golden Knights all the way to a Stanley Cup championship in 2023. He also led the Boston Bruins to the Stanley Cup final in 2019, falling in seven games to Berube’s St. Louis Blues.
The 60-year-old Cassidy owns the fourth-best points percentage of any active coach.