After the Boston Bruins eliminated the Toronto Maple Leafs from the Stanley Cup playoffs a few weeks ago, Bruins coach Jim Montgomery, in a postgame news conference, acknowledged a surprising influence.
“I had a real good discussion with Mike Babcock before Game 6 about owning the moment and how to push your team through,” Montgomery said after his team’s Game 7 overtime win.
Babcock, 61, coached parts of 18 seasons in the NHL and led three teams to the Stanley Cup Final, winning in 2008 with the Detroit Red Wings. However, following allegations of bullying and mistreating players, he spent most of the past four years in hockey exile. Babcock briefly returned to the NHL last July, hired as the head coach of the Columbus Blue Jackets, but he resigned in September before coaching a single game after reportedly pressuring players to share private photos during one-on-one meetings.
Babcock’s behavior was notorious in NHL locker rooms for years, with some players attempting to draw attention to it. However, his winning reputation shielded him from serious scrutiny.
“He got away with a lot of stuff in an era where nobody really brought light to any of the stuff that he did,” said a former player under Babcock in Detroit.
Now, eight months following his exit from Columbus, more of Babcock’s former players and staffers spoke to The Athletic about their experiences with him to provide a fuller accounting of his tenure, its impact and what led to one of the sport’s most spectacular reputational collapses. Montgomery also said out loud what people around hockey quietly admit: Babcock may be officially out of the game, but many NHL coaches and executives still respect and consult him, and he maintains a hold within the league’s establishment.
“The issue is he’s a powerful guy still,” said one of Babcock’s former players, who like some others asked not to be named because he still fears reprisal from within the NHL. “And he’s connected with a lot of influential people.”
Babcock was branded a wunderkind in the 1990s while coaching Canadian university, major junior and minor pro hockey. In six seasons (1994-2000) leading the Spokane Chiefs, the team went 224-172-29 and he twice won Western Hockey League West Division coach of the year.
His rising reputation earned him a coveted position as Canada’s head coach at the 1997 IIHF World Junior Championship, where his team won a gold medal.
Despite having no NHL experience as a player or coach, Babcock believed he deserved an NHL coaching job. After two seasons in Cincinnati coaching the Anaheim Ducks’ AHL affiliate, Babcock was one of 19 candidates for the Ducks job after Bryan Murray vacated the position to become general manager in 2002.
Murray narrowed his list to three finalists, then interviewed the 39-year-old Babcock. He immediately canceled his meetings with the other candidates. Babcock would then take a Ducks team that finished 13th in the Western Conference the previous season to the Stanley Cup Final as a rookie coach.
Babcock was a cerebral tactician, but his leadership style was demanding and autocratic.
In his first NHL training camp, Babcock sidelined three well-liked veterans: Jason York, Denny Lambert and German Titov. Lambert and York said they arrived at the Ducks training camp to find their names had been removed from their stalls and gear cleared out. Babcock told them they could not be around the team at all, they said. The players practiced alone on empty ice in the afternoon.
At the time, Lambert’s 2-year-old son was in the hospital with a broken femur; he said he wouldn’t have left his family in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, if the Ducks had told him he was unwanted. Lambert said he asked Babcock why he’d been removed. Was it his performance on the ice? An issue in the locker room? Babcock told Lambert there was nothing he could do to change his mind.
“There was no respect at all,” Lambert said. “I would never treat anyone like that.”
When York confronted Babcock, he was told it was just an attempt to inject some leadership with the AHL group, York said. After several days, the players were banished from the rink. Even when Lambert later hitched a ride on the team plane so he could return to his family, he sat away from the other players, feeling he was no longer welcome.
“It’s not just you that you’re playing for. You’re playing for your family, you’re playing for your kids, right?” said York. “He took my livelihood like it was nothing.”
Babcock spoke in a folksy manner that underscored his Saskatchewan backcountry upbringing. He talked about hard work and accountability, values he learned from his father, a mining engineer. Babcock also presented himself as a Renaissance man. He studied sports psychology at McGill University and prided himself on pulling the right mental strings to get the most out of his players.
But Babcock swiftly earned a reputation for singling out players and making an example of them, sometimes to the point of humiliation.
Tony Martensson, a young center who played in the Ducks organization with Cincinnati before being called up to the NHL in 2003, told Swedish newspaper Expressen in February 2021 that Babcock derided him for being too small and weak. Before one game during the 2003-04 season, Martensson was part of the pregame warmup, but when he came off the ice and into the locker room, Babcock told him that he wasn’t playing. Martensson started changing, but Babcock then said in front of the team: “What the hell are you doing?” He told Martensson to change away from the team in the shower.
“In essence, he’s a bully,” Martensson told Expressen.
In 2005, after the NHL lockout, Babcock left Anaheim to coach the Red Wings. In the media, his coaching style was described as tough but effective and his blue-collar roots played well in Detroit.
Babcock arrived in Johan Franzen’s rookie season. (The Swedish winger played 11 seasons with the Red Wings before retiring in 2016.) Franzen told Expressen that during a playoff game against Nashville in April 2012, Babcock verbally assaulted him.
“I get the shivers when I think about it,” he said. “But that was just one out of a hundred things he did. The tip of the iceberg.”
Franzen described Babcock as meticulous and well-prepared, adept at putting a team together and getting buy-in from players. “But then, he’s a terrible person, the worst I have ever met. He’s a bully who was attacking people,” Franzen told the newspaper. “It could be a cleaner at the arena in Detroit or anybody. He would lay into people without any reason.”
Franzen said that starting in 2011, he became terrified of being at the rink as “verbal attacks” on him and others continued. Chris Chelios, a Hall of Fame defenseman who played for Babcock in Detroit, was appalled by how Babcock treated Franzen.
“Literally, he was calling him into his office once a week to call him a fat pig and say that your teammates hate you and why don’t you just quit,” Chelios told the “Spittin’ Chiclets” podcast, which also first revealed the photo-sharing allegations in Columbus.
In January 202
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