Ballard would have ordered Matthews Marner and Nylander traded as soon as their ELCs were up.
The Ballard reference was taken from the post I quoted, and the only older Leaf fans would get the tongue-in-cheek reference to coach with Bag over his head firing reference .
The back story is back in the 1980's Harold Ballard fired then coach Roger Neilson, and then wanted him to show up again behind the Leafs bench with a bag over his head, rehired a few days later which Neilson refused obviously.,
“Game time was coming up and Harold came out of his office in his bathrobe,” said Stellick. “That’s when I heard him tell Gregory he wanted Roger to wear the bag. No one would be standing behind our bench until just before puck drop, then Roger would come out wearing the bag and pull it off or have someone do it at the last second.”
Here is that backstory to that circus.
A look back at the Roger Neilson 'paper bag' game and Pal Hal's theatre of the absurd
But 40 years ago this month, the owner almost put one over Roger Neilson’s head for a game when he ‘unfired’ his head coach. The three-day soap opera, which included Neilson being dismissed on live TV, a desperate search for a replacement, a player campaign to have Ballard change his mind, capped by the paper-bag caper, remains one of the most entertaining — make that embarrassing — episodes in Leaf history.
“The whole charade was so off-the-wall,” captain Darryl Sittler said in taking himself back to those crazy days on Carlton St. “But there were a lot of circuses back then.”
To quickly recap, Ballard had grown impatient with “school-boy hockey” as Neilson’s second season was coming to an end. After beating the Islanders and getting to the conference final the year before, the Leafs wobbled down the stretch and went into Montreal on a Thursday with a four-game losing streak.
After praising Neilson’s use of video and early analytics, Ballard belittled the cerebral coach in public. He plotted to fire Neilson, but as in many of his personnel decisions, lacked courage to do it face-to-face.
When Toronto played well, but lost 2-1 to the Stanley Cup-champion Habs, TV host Dick Beddoes chased Ballard down the Forum hallway, a cameraman in tow. The two huddled and Beddoes rushed back to tell viewers Neilson was gone.
Continued Full story:
A look back at the Roger Neilson 'paper bag' game and Pal Hal's theatre of the absurd
