At 59, and armed with eff you money, seems like a good set up for an official, permanent exit from the game.
Toronto fired Babcock in 2019 and he went from supercoach status to irrelevance in the span of a few short years.
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It will be three years ago this fall that Mike Babcock was fired by the Maple Leafs. And what were the odds, on that November day in 2019 when Brendan Shanahan anointed Sheldon Keefe as Babcock’s successor in the Arizona desert, that Toronto would have turned out to be the site of Babcock’s last NHL job?
Certainly, at that moment, it seemed a given that Babcock would coach in the NHL again, and soon. No matter your opinion of his work with the Leafs, this is a Stanley Cup winner who is 10th on the all-time regular-season wins list, and whose .608 career points percentage is higher than anyone in the top nine not named Scotty Bowman and Joel Quenneville. The last three times Canada played some version of best-on-best hockey — at the Olympics in 2010 and 2014, and at the World Cup in 2016 — Babcock coached the country’s best players to three gold medals. Never mind his failure to deliver the Leafs to the promised land of post-season success, the man’s resumé has more than a few redeeming accomplishments.
But for all that, Babcock told a radio station in Saskatoon last week that, after spending last season as a volunteer head coach of the University of Saskatchewan Huskies, he has decided on retiring from coaching, full stop.
“My wife and I have discussed this a ton … We can do what we want. And that’s what we’re doing,” he said of retirement. “We’re enjoying it. We always said we were going to retire at 60, and I’m 59.”
As Babcock said in his interview on Saskatoon radio, he’s got a passion for hunting, water skiing and downhill skiing. He owns “farms,” plural, in Ohio, where he hunts. He’s “addicted” to the water-skiing course at his Michigan lake house. And if he’s not there, he’s probably in Vail, Colo., or Palm Springs, Calif.
“Life’s good for the Babcocks, and we enjoy it a lot, to say the least,” he said.
Still, considering Babcock made his career in a league with a time-honoured devotion to recycling coaches, you’d be foolish not to raise a skeptical brow at the notion that Babcock’s coaching career is at its end. Never mind that Babcock is a rich man who is still being paid by the Leafs through the end of the coming season — the last year of the eight-year contract worth $50 million (U.S.) he signed in 2015. He was among the candidates for the Washington Capitals job that went to Peter Laviolette a couple of years back. So it’s hard to imagine Babcock wouldn’t at least consider returning to the bench if he got a call from a general manager in distress. And Babcock, to that point, couldn’t help but leave the door open a crack.
“Now, if things change, I guess they change, but surely (coaching in the NHL again is) not our plan,” he said.
If that’s indeed the case, the final act of Babcock’s otherwise impressive career amounts to a stunning fall from grace — from supercoach status to irrelevance in the span of a few short years, from Team Canada-running guru to radioactive in a relative blink. Beyond that Washington job in 2020, Babcock’s name hasn’t been bandied about by media insiders particularly often of late.
Some of that, surely, came down to Babcock’s decision to spend last season in Saskatoon, where he was open about his desire to coach alongside his son, Michael Babcock III, who took an assistant coaching position with the Huskies while pursuing an MBA. 
national team. 
