On Friday, the Maple Leafs announced an addition to Mike Babcock’s staff, hiring Jacques Lemaire as Special Assignment Coach.
Most recently, Lemaire had filled that same role for the New Jersey Devils.
This is a fantastic hire for Toronto, for a lot of different reasons.
The most critical of those reasons is that Lemaire is a superb coach. After a playing career that included eight Stanley Cup wins with Montreal, he moved behind the bench. He won the Jack Adams Award twice and enjoyed a head coaching career spanning 1,262 games and including a Stanley Cup win in 1995 with the Devils.
Perhaps most impressive is his work with Minnesota; he guided the expansion Wild to the third round of the playoffs in just their third season and has a career 0.563 points percentage despite spending some tough seasons with the new NHL franchise.
He’s become (in?)famous as the man who popularized the neutral-zone trap at the NHL level. The Devils won the Cup playing it, and the Wild were astonishingly successful for an expansion team using it. New Jersey, in particular, embraced it to such an e ...
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Article written by Jonathan Willis
Jacques Lemaire Hire Is a Big Win for Mike Babcock, Toronto Maple Leafs
August 14th, 2015 by Jonathan Willis Leave a reply »
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