Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Dave Nonis faced the press in the bowels of the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday morning to discuss the firing of head coach Randy Carlyle.
Though Nonis isn't the man with his finger on the button in the Maple Leafs organization anymore, and though he inherited Carlyle from his predecessor Brian Burke, he was the man tasked with explaining the club's somewhat surprising - if arguably overdue - decision to fire a head coach bafflingly signed to a contract extension less than 12 months ago.
"No, Randy deserved to come back," Nonis answered when asked if the club had regrets about extending Carlyle. "He had done enough to come back."
But not enough to stay.
Related: Carlyle's stubborn, inflexible ways cost him his job in Toronto
In elaborating on the club's decision, which he admitted had been discussed by management for "a while," Nonis focused in on two key issues: inconsistency, and the way the the club's performance trended in recent weeks.
"It's not that we have players who can't do it," Nonis began, in an answer to a question about consistent effort. "It's that our consistency hasn't been there, it's been trending downward for the last little while - where our consistency has been waning even more.
"You can chalk that up to players not listening if you'd like," he continued, "but I don't think it's that they're not capable - because they are. And that's one of the reasons we're making this move."
That quote sounds like a rather direct repudiation of some of Carlyle's comments about his roster over the weekend. With Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan in attendance for a road game in Winnipeg on Saturday - you know an executive means business when he heads to Winnipeg in January - Carlyle suggested his club's issues were personnel-related after a dispiriting 5-1 loss.
"You don't always have the luxury to say that you'd like this player or that player or this type of player. That's not the way it works," Carlyle told Dave Feschuk of the Toronto Star. "How it works is you have an organization that provides you with players, and our job, as we've said all along, is just to coach 'em up."
No longer.
Nonis even went so far as to suggest that jettisoning Carlyle might actually improve the club.
"We did this to try and improve our group," he said. "This isn't throwing in the towel, we think this team has the ability to do good things and this is a step in that direction."
As for what Carlyle's departure means for the Maple Leafs' offensively talented but deeply flawed "core" of players, Nonis insisted it doesn't change anything, but only because players are always movable, and always being evaluated.
"You're always looking at the core," Nonis added. "I've said before, players are movable. None of them have full no-move (clauses).
"This doesn't change anything. This wasn't about the core not listening to Randy or anything like that. We just felt we weren't going in the right direction."
