The Toronto Maple Leafs have hired Jim Hiller as the team’s new head coach
Is it good news? Sure. But, during a week of hockey backlash, the timing of the announcement could have been better
After letting go of Craig Berube in May, the Toronto Maple Leafs have hired Jim Hiller to be the team’s new head coach.
Hiller was previously an assistant coach with the team from 2015 until 2019. Most recently, he was head coach of the Los Angeles Kings. He will be the 41st head coach in Leafs franchise history.
While we’d love to be optimistic, it’s difficult to be enthusiastic about anything hockey-related at the moment. Yesterday’s announcement that Hockey Night in Canada will no longer air on the CBC because the public broadcaster and Rogers Communications couldn’t land on a sublicensing agreement is disheartening. A paid subscription will now be required to watch hockey in this country, and that’s a shame.
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Far more disturbing was Ron MacLean’s wildly poor choice of words during game six of the Stanley Cup finals. As a “fun spoof” referencing the movie The Hangover, MacLean, for some baffling reason, made a quip about roofies, a commonly known slang term for date-rape drugs. (He later apologized.)
If we were the face of a sport desperately trying to rehabilitate its image after a high-profile sexual assault trial, we would probably not joke about drugs used to incapacitate people in order to sexually assault them. And if we were in charge of hockey personnel announcements, we would probably have waited for the public’s frustration toward both of these recent missteps to die down. But we don’t make the rules!
In a statement, Hiller said he’s excited to return to the Leafs. “This is a special organization with great players, passionate fans and high expectations,” he said. “I’m looking forward to getting to work with our players and staff and doing everything we can to help this team reach its full potential.”
Congrats to Hiller, and no pressure, but maybe he can do something about hockey’s horrendous vibes while he’s at it.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
