Who is Sheldon Keefe, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ new head coach?

The Toronto Maple Leafs fired high-profile head coach Mike Babcock on Wednesday, but who is his replacement Sheldon Keefe and why are fans excited about him?

The Toronto Maple Leafs did the unthinkable — kind of — on Wednesday and fired long-time NHL head coach Mike Babcock. The Maple Leafs’ struggles this season have been well documented, as the team has underperformed throughout most of the season and in the midst of a six-game losing skid, the team decided it was time to make a change to Sheldon Keefe.

With that change from veteran bench boss Babcock comes newly minted NHL head coach Keefe. The Maple Leafs job is Keefe’s first in the NHL after years of coaching Toronto’s AHL club, the Marlies, and is a major step up from being behind the bench in the minors to suddenly coaching on one of the NHL’s most biggest stages.

Keefe may not have the NHL coaching pedigree that brought Babcock to Toronto in 2015, but he’s been a possibility for the Maple Leafs since he joined the team that same summer. Maple Leafs’ general manager Kyle Dubas, who became the GM in 2018 after Lou Lamoriello was fired, has been close to Keefe going back nearly half a decade. The pair were instrumental in the Marlies’ Calder Cup winning season in 2018, and the franchise extended Keefe’s stay with the minor league club earlier this year due to his success.

With that extension that was signed earlier this year, many theorized that Keefe was being lined up to take over the Maple Leafs down the road after Babcock’s massive eight-year, $50 million deal expired following the 2022-23 season. Babcock was a hire from a different Maple Leafs’ regime after all, and since Lamoriello’s time as the general manager of the Maple Leafs had passed, it was only reasonable to expect Dubas to lock down his guy for the future.

Babcock’s firing has only expedited that process it seems, and while Keefe has no NHL head coaching experience, he’s incredibly familiar with the Maple Leafs’ inner workings. Keefe is also a decorated AHL coach, as he coached the Marlies to the franchises’ first Calder Cup in 2018. In the AHL, Keefe’s record is stellar at 189-87-20-1 over four seasons with the Marlies and he holds the highest winning percentage of any Marlies’ head coach to date at .688 percent.

In his career in the OHL before Toronto, Keefe was the bench boss of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds, and won the 2014-15 CHL and OHL Coach of the Year awards for his work leading the team to a league-best 54-12-0-2 record that season.

What should excite Maple Leafs fans the most, however, is Keefe’s relationship to many of the young players in Toronto. Keefe has experiencing coaching more than 10 current Maple Leafs players — including William Nylander and Zach Hyman — during his AHL tenure, a relationship that should bear fruit for Toronto due to his success in the minors. While Keefe lacks true NHL head coaching experience, with a roster as home-grown as the Maple Leafs’ is, the team seems to be in good hands at first blush.

The real test for Keefe will be getting veterans such as John Tavares, plus the young players he hadn’t coached in Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner, to buy into his system. Making the jump from the minors to the NHL can be a difficult one, and Keefe will have to piece together a locker room that may have been fractured during Babcock’s final 23 games of his tenure.

Not only that, Keefe will also have to turn around a team that’s been slumping across the board in terms of statistics. This season, the Maple Leafs have given up the first goal of the game 18 times in 23 games played, the highest in the NHL. Toronto has allowed the second-most goals this season (79) and have the fifth-worst penalty kill (73.1 percent) at the quarter-mark of their year.

The Maple Leafs have the eighth-best goals scored on the season (72) and haven’t had a full, healthy lineup all season, but the holes in Toronto’s game are just as glaring as they were when Babcock was still head coach.

It’s a tall task for sure, especially considering the fact that the Maple Leafs were expected to be Stanley Cup contenders this season. Keefe will have a lot of work to do to get Toronto back to playoff form, but as far as coaching hires go, the Maple Leafs always had their guy waiting in the wings.