Mike Babcock quits as Blue Jackets coach – another sign of a bigger problem in the NHL

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If you lean back out of the daily news cycle and look at hockey’s defining modern characteristics, they all reduce to one thing – the sport won’t change.

Hockey likes doing things the way they’ve always been done. NHL players and ownership may hate each other, but they are bound together in this permanent nostalgia. No rule should ever be updated and no tradition ever thrown over. In a perfect world, the NHL of right now would look like the one from the 1960s, forever and ever Amen.

This tendency brings hockey no end of grief. The Hockey Canada scandal is a failure on multiple fronts, but mostly it is denial of modernity. What other 21st-century not-for-profit business would be caught paying off sexual-assault lawsuits with money raked in from kids’ fees and then insist that nothing and no one need change? What other cultural outfit still thinks that ‘Hey, something bad happened but we shouldn’t talk about it’ is a workable explanation to serious accusations?

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A lot of people who hate what happened at Hockey Canada still like most parts of the game’s time-warping character. They miss the days when the players were good guys who loved their moms and liked knocking each other’s teeth out. The players still conform to this Ward Cleaver-with-a-strong-right-hook ideal. That’s why they all seem like they’re the same guy with a slightly different haircut.

But no one in recent history has so perfectly represented this high-traffic bridge to the past as Mike Babcock.

Ten years ago, Babcock was the greatest coach in the game. No one would have seriously argued that with you. If he’d figured out how to push the Toronto Maple Leafs over the line, more than a few would’ve called him the greatest coach in history.

On Sunday, after quitting as Columbus Blue Jackets coach without having stood behind the bench for a single game, he is a victim of history. Mostly his own.

“Upon reflection, it has become clear that continuing as head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets was going to be too much of a distraction,” Babcock was quoted as saying Sunday in a team news release.

“Reflection.” Sure. As evidenced by the way he has continued to do his job, Babcock may be the least reflective guy in the game, and that is really saying something.

Other sports have moved on from the my-way-or-the-highway school of motivation. Not because they are simpering or the players are grown children, but because sports business doesn’t see the athletes as entirely human.

They may need oxygen to survive, but they are first and foremost multimillion-dollar investments. Why would you want some guy mentally crushing your big business bet? Or, much worse, convincing him that when the time comes to choose where he wants to play, that he should go somewhere else?

By making players show him their phone photos, Mike Babcock shows them who’s boss

Modern coaches are man managers. They are surrogate fathers, late-night confidantes and semi-professional therapists. Figuring out how to put the power play together is the least important part of their jobs.

Every other sport realized that ages ago. But not hockey.

Hockey still walks around like this is 1940-something and if the coach doesn’t like the look you gave him when he called a bag skate, well, you’re back on the bus to Moose Jaw, pal.

Many of the most celebrated coaches in the game continue to be guys who belong to the freakout school of human-resource management. Babcock was thought to be a hybrid – an old-school guy who’d mastered new-school techniques.

After he’d failed in Toronto, people he’d rubbed the wrong way throughout his career swarmed him. According to the stories, Babcock was a bully who pitted players against each other. He played mind games. The only defensible thing that could be said about his behaviour was that he seemed to target stars rather than scrubs.

Inside hockey, none of this was seen as a genuinely big deal. Most hockey people played the game and have their own stories.

But nobody felt bad for Babcock. This was sports’ karmic wheel turning. He got to the top by using the dark arts. Now the same malign magic was being used to bring him down.

Babcock went away quietly. He did his penance in university hockey. After four years, without ever having publicly discussed what happened, he returned to the NHL.

I will assume that when any other business hires a CEO who’s been tainted by scandal, that is discussed during the hiring process. You don’t have to tell me every ugly detail. Just convince me that your previous problem is not going to become my future one.

I further assume that anyone whose career has been very publicly blown up by their approach to the job has had a short conversation with themselves – ‘Guess I’d better not do that again.’

But not in hockey. In hockey, nothing need ever change. The less things change, the better. Including the things that are a terrible idea.

Babcock wasn’t yet 10 degrees into his redemption arc and already up to his old tricks.

According to Blue Jackets’ players Boone Jenner and Johnny Gaudreau – stars in the Columbus context – Babcock asked to see the photos in their phones. He wanted to know what kind of people he was dealing with.

The idea of handing over your phone may not bother you, but think of it in this context: If your kid got a job just out of school and her new manager asked to see her photos, what would your gut reaction be? I’m going to guess somewhere between ‘That’s weird’ to ‘Oh hell no.’ I’m going to guess it would not be, ‘Sounds like an amazing way to form a professional connection.’

The story isn’t that Babcock did it. It’s that he felt empowered to do it again.

When the story came out on the Spittin’ Chiclets podcast, everyone in Columbus doubled down. Babcock, the players, management – they all insisted nothing strange had happened.

The NHL Players’ Association rolled into town to ask a few questions and less than a week later, Babcock is gone. Funny how that works.

Any other sport, you’d say, ‘That’s really it for Mike Babcock.’ But hockey’s a horror film – no matter what you do to move on, the past keeps coming back to haunt you.

On Sunday, Columbus solved a problem of its own making. And because everybody’s distracted by that, hockey won’t have to discuss its much larger issue.