It took a minute, but the Mike Babcock image rehabilitation tour is here.
Tuesday afternoon, The Athletic’s Pierre LeBrun published an interview with the legendary NHL coach who, after a year of silence, finally addressed allegations that he verbally abused players while with the Detroit Red Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs.
The interview, surprisingly or not, shows just how much Babcock hasn’t learned during his time away from the game.
The most damning allegations against Babcock came from former Red Wing Johan Franzen, who, in December of 2019 spoke about Babcock’s abusive behavior.
“He’s a terrible person, the worst I ever met. He’s a bully who was attacking people. It could be a cleaner at the arena in Detroit or anybody. He would lay into people without any reason,” Franzen told Swedish paper Expresssen.
Franzen also confirmed a story first told by former teammate Chris Chelios, who recalled how Babcock once tore into Franzen during a game.
“Some of the things he said to him on the bench, I don’t know what he said to him behind closed doors one-on-one, but he blatantly verbally assaulted him during the game on the bench,” Chelios said. “It got to the point where poor Johan, no one really knowing he was suffering with the concussion thing and the depression thing, he just broke down and had nervous breakdown, not only on the bench but after the game in one of the rooms in Nashville. It was probably one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”
There was also an incident with the Maple Leafs, first reported by the Toronto Sun, where Babcock made rookie Mitch Marner rank players by their work ethic and then showed the ensuing list to his teammates.
In talking to LeBrun, Babcock offered little in the way of acknowledging that he’d done anything wrong as a coach or even that he’d reflected on his behavior. Instead, he turned the conversation around to focus on his own hurt feelings.
“When a player that you’ve coached says that about you, it stings you big time. But not only does it sting for that, if you’ve been involved with mental health like I have …”Babcock said, referencing his work with the Bell Let’s Talk campaign. “Can you imagine having someone say that about you when you have been involved in mental health as much as I have?”
Nowhere in the interview does Babcock apologize to Franzen for his words, nor does he acknowledge that his behavior was abusive. In some tremendous double speak, he hints that he’s actually the aggrieved party in all this.
“So when something like this comes out, that hurts you. And it should. No one ever wants to be perceived that way. I can think of nothing worse than one of my kids going through something that they feel would be like this.’’
He also seems to imply that it isn’t his job as a coach to know when he’s being abusive, and instead, says it’s important to have “a good sports psych person” around, who can essentially tell him when he’s being abusive.
“But I think in today’s world, having a good sports psych person or someone besides yourself that is looking at the whole situation and can say, ‘Hey, it’s off the tracks here. It’s not as good here as you think,’’’ he said.
While he disputes the details of what went down with Marner, Babcock does acknowledge that he was at fault.
“And there’s no question that it was all on me. Not on Mitch. It was all on me. I made a mistake,” he says, but still doesn’t apologize.
Missing from the conversation is any real contrition, any sign that Babcock looked inward to see where he might have damaged his players and then vowed to do better. Instead, Babcock talks about how the past year of his life has been one of the best yet, one he spent on vacation with his family.
There’s no remorse here, nothing that suggests Babcock is participating in anything more than some corporate mandated PR by NBC Sports, for which he’ll be doing analysis later this season.
It’s essentially a hockey grift, and The Athletic interview included nothing from the perspective of the players he harmed, or from the arena workers Franzen alleges he also abused. There is nothing but Babcock’s narrative, one that LeBrun didn’t push back against at all, but simply let stand without any kind of challenge.
There’s no critical look at the culture that lead to Babcock getting away with this behavior for decades, nothing that invites the hockey community to look deeper into the toxic systems it upholds. All that’s at stake here is the rehabilitation of Babcock, a hockey icon who no one seems interested in holding accountable.
To do justice to the allegations against Babcock, the voices of his victims were the ones that needed to be heard. Instead, Babcock had an open mic and a huge platform to show how he was the one who was really wronged.