Former Blues coach Craig Berube officially hired to coach Maple Leafs (2024)

Craig Berube has a new home.

Berube was hired by the Maple Leafs on Friday afternoon, as the former Blues coach takes over perhaps the most high-profile job in the NHL. Berube coached the Blues for parts of six seasons before he was fired in December after a 13-14-1 start in St. Louis.

The news was reported earlier on Friday by Sportsnet.

Berube won the 2019 Stanley Cup with the Blues after taking over as an interim coach when Mike Yeo was fired.

Berube left St. Louis as one of the most decorated coaches in Blues history. He ranks third in the franchise in regular-season games, regular-season wins, postseason games and postseason wins. Only Joel Quenneville and Ken Hitchco*ck have more regular-season accolades, while only Quenneville and Scotty Bowman have more playoff success than Berube.

During this summer's coaching carousel, Berube was regarded as the top coach on the market, and reportedly generated interest from Ottawa, New Jersey and Winnipeg, in addition to Toronto.

Berube is one of seven active coaches that have won the Stanley Cup, and he was the only one this summer available to hire. Jon Cooper (Tampa Bay), Mike Sullivan (Pittsburgh), Jared Bednar (Colorado), Bruce Cassidy (Vegas), Peter Laviolette (NY Rangers) and John Tortorella (Philadelphia) all already had jobs.

Berube takes over a Toronto team that has not won a Stanley Cup since 1967, and has won just one playoff round since 2004. The Maple Leafs lost to Boston in the first round of the playoffs this season, losing Game 7 in overtime to the Bruins.

Toronto is expected to make major changes to its roster this summer, potentially around its core four players of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, John Tavares and William Nylander.

When the Blues fired Berube, it installed Drew Bannister as the interim coach. Under Bannister, the Blues went 30-19-5, a pace that would have been good for 99 points across a full 82-game season.

Earlier this month, the Blues hired Bannister on a full-time basis, signing him to a two-year contract that will expire the same time as general manager Doug Armstrong.

With a focus sharpened like a skate blade, the goalie patrolled his net front when, suddenly, Patrick Maroon shoved his posterior into the man’s face.

The immovable Maroon just stood there, unwavering, as a helpless defenseman tried to dislodge the brute Bruin.

Meanwhile, Maroon’s Boston teammate snapped a wrist shot. Impossibly, Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky made the Game 4 save, even with 234 pounds of veteran savvy shielding the shot.

That’s what Maroon does. All game. He throws his big body around. He stirs up stuff. He talks trash. He body-checks. He ego-checks. The St. Louis native is a delightful nuisance and a guilty pleasure to watch.

Oh, and he wins. Stanley Cup in 2019, Stanley Cup in 2020, Stanley Cup in 2021. Lost in the Cup Final in 2022. He’s never the best player on the roster but often the right player to have on the roster. Teammates respect the heck out of him. And now, at 36, Pat’s at it again in the postseason. He’s an unapologetic disturber. Maroon is like a Jackson Pollock brushstroke upon a Monet.

Now, it’s indeed weird that, of all teams, he’s with Boston. The Oakville native, who’d play childhood basem*nt hockey for a makeshift Stanley Cup, helped win the real thing for his hometown Blues against the Bruins. I’ll never forget interviewing him, along with a couple of other reporters, on the Boston ice after Game 7.

“We did it!” Maroon said as tears filled his eyes and his voice cracked. “We did it. There’s nothing else. We put everything on the line from Jan. 3 on, and we deserve this. And what a way to finish it, on the road where we play great. ... Me and my son will take this to our graves. We’ll have memories for life.”

But now, that’s his home ice. And in this second-round series with the Panthers, he’s reliably battling and board-rattling as he does each May. He’s no longer a third-liner, like he was with St. Louis in 2019; he’s a fourth-liner, playing the fewest minutes of all the forwards. But he maximizes the minutes, he’s tickin’ every tick.

Florida leads the series three games to two, but Boston hosts Game 6 on Friday. It’s a scintillating series and perfect for the St. Louis hockey fans whose Blues are golfing. Florida has Vladimir Tarasenko and St. Louis native Matthew Tkachuk. Boston has St. Louisan Trent Frederic, he of the “for a hole in your roof or a whole new roof” family. And the Bruins’ coach is former Blue Jim Montgomery, who was recently a Blues assistant and, before that, the coach of the Dallas Stars. Yep, “Monty” was behind the bench for the losing team in Game 7 of the 2019 second-round series, when a certain St. Louisan smacked in the series-winning goal in double overtime.

Maroon’s goal is iconic — and at this point, iconic might be an understatement. Someday, he and David Freese should open a sports bar.

Maroon doesn’t score much anymore — not that this Pat was ever like another Pat, LaFontaine — but he tallies checks on the forecheck and penalty minutes, too. That said, the bearded villain is being very cautious with his callousness. Earlier in the series, Boston’s captain Brad Marchand — a former Maroon enemy — was violently injured by Florida’s Sam Bennett. Multiple times, Maroon has tried to lure Bennett into a fight — heck, throughout this series, he’s tried to lure numerous Panthers into fights. But Bennett won’t drop the gloves — and Maroon’s not going to earn a penalty for recklessly punching a guy who didn’t agree to a fight.

Incidentally, Maroon is also mad at the superstar Tkachuk, who Maroon felt threw some unsportsmanlike extra punches in a fight with Boston’s David Pastrnak. Alas, Maroon told ESPN: “Tkachuk’s not going to fight me. If I go out there and take a dumb penalty and they got a power play, my job’s not accomplished. ... And I mean listen, let’s be realistic: I’m probably never playing against Tkachuk anyway.”

In Game 5 at Florida, Maroon kept the gloves on and even showed off his mitts. In the first period of an airtight game, his quick hands fed a teammate for a point-blank look, which was bungled. Maroon also showed off his strength. Behind the Florida goal, he pinned a puck with his left skate — and then stick blade — for 16.4 seconds (I used a stopwatch). Maroon just coolly waited for a teammate to find open ice for a pass, while some Panthers icily tried to pry away the puck. It worked — Maroon set up a scoring chance, which a teammate couldn’t get past Bobrovsky.

This Bruins-Panthers rivalry is boiling. Last year, the Bruins led three games to one, but Florida won the final three. This year, Boston was behind 3-1 before winning Game 5. Oh, and in the Bruins’ 100 years of hockey, their franchise is 0-25 in series it trailed 3-1.

The series will likely come down to the play of one of the other fellows mentioned above — perhaps Pastrnak or Tkachuk. But at least for one more game, we can experience the play of the unrelenting, unrepentant “Big Rig,” who sure makes hockey fun.

ST. LOUIS — Two weeks ago, when Comcast abruptly dropped broadcasts for the St. Louis Cardinals and other teams aired by Bally Sports, local baseball officials said they were “disappointed.”

This week, attorneys for MLB were more blunt. They cast the Comcast breakup as a setback to Bally’s efforts to emerge from bankruptcy.

“The weather is getting warmer. The teams are out of spring training, and the races are beginning to develop. And we have multiple teams who are facing substantial problems — that are appearing on the front pages of their local papers, on their local news — because their fans are unable to watch these games,” said James Bromley, an attorney representing Major League Baseball, during a Wednesday court hearing in Houston.

Diamond Sports Group — the parent company of Cardinals and Blues broadcaster Bally Sports Midwest — has been in Chapter 11 proceedings for the past year, a product of years of declining cable subscribership. The company is now pushing forward a plan to inject money into the business and emerge from bankruptcy in the coming weeks.

But attorneys for baseball, hockey and basketball leagues criticized Diamond for failing to reach a renewal agreement with Comcast, which dropped Bally Sports games this month after talks broke down.

The change annoyed Cardinals fans, mainly central Illinois (subscriptions to Comcast’s Xfinity aren’t available in the St. Louis market). And the baseball league argued in court filings this week that if Diamond can’t reach a deal with Comcast, the company’s plan to emerge from bankruptcy and continue broadcasting games will be “unconfirmable.”

Diamond relies on three distributors — Comcast, DirecTV and Charter — for the majority of its revenues, and Comcast is now the last one without a renewal agreement.

An attorney for Diamond said the company has reached renewal agreements with Charter, DirecTV and Cox — the company’s first, second and fourth-largest distributors, respectively. And it is still working toward a deal to get Comcast back, and restore games for fans in the affected areas.

“We remain optimistic that we can resolve this,” said Brian Hermann, an attorney representing Diamond in the case.

Bromley, the baseball league’s attorney, acknowledged Diamond’s intent to “keep feet to the fire” in talks with Comcast. But, he added, “I’m not sure that there’s a fire, and I don’t know where Comcast’s feet are. They simply don’t have any obligation to do anything, with respect to these debtors.”

In the court filings, the league’s attorneys listed 11 recent performances that Comcast-reliant baseball fans missed, including a sequence of seven scoreless innings pitched by Cardinal Sonny Gray. And they again raised concern that they lack detail on the terms of Diamond’s renewal agreements with Charter and DirecTV.

“We have, simply, no information,” Bromley said. “Everything, right now, is up in the air.”

Diamond’s attorney pushed back the deadline by two weeks, until June 5, for creditors and other stakeholders to cast votes in favor or against the company’s bankruptcy plan, and file any objections to it. But he said the company wants to keep a June 18 date in place for a confirmation hearing — when the judge could, potentially, approve the plan.

Hermann said Diamond is getting close to a naming rights deal, which would provide “another significant source of revenue.”

Decisions made in the Houston bankruptcy court in the coming weeks are of existential concern for Diamond, which, as recently as winter, was expected to eventually wind down operations. But the approval or denial of the plan will also determine how teams like the Cardinals reach their fans in the coming years, and whether those teams can continue to expect the broadcast rights payments they have historically received from Diamond.

Depending on the team and the agreement, experts say broadcast rights are often the top source of teams’ revenues — larger, even, than ticket sales and corporate sponsorships.

Near the end of the Wednesday hearing, the judge who has shepherded Diamond through Chapter 11 proceedings expressed sympathy for the sports leagues. There are, indeed, some serious questions that Diamond must answer, he said.

But, he added, he suspects that the company understands that it has work to do.

“I’m not going to say anything more at this time,” said Judge Christopher Lopez, of the Southern District of Texas Bankruptcy Court. “Let’s just continue down the path. There’s been a lot of good work done, and I don’t want to lose sight of it.”

“I know everybody’s got a real stake in where we are. And I get it.”