Maple Leafs Missing Opportunities with Healthy Scratches
This week’s Hockey Night in Canada panel dusted off an interesting question about something that Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Craig Berube does regularly. If one of the team’s forwards doesn't play well, that person often sits out the next game as a healthy scratch. Over the past week, it’s happened to Dakota Joshua and Matias Maccelli. The question is whether that's a good idea. Does it actually improve the player who made the mistake(s)?
Does a healthy scratch truly motivate an NHL player, or is it the old hammer coaches reach for when nothing else seems to work? I’ve heard versions of this argument for years, and the divide remains as sharp today as ever. Some insist that the healthy scratch is the last meaningful tool a coach has. Others argue it’s little more than a relic that does more harm than good, especially with players who’ve earned enough respect in this league to expect better communication.
Why Coaches Still Play the Healthy Scratch Card
Supporters of the tactic will tell you that ice time is the only currency a coach controls. When details waver, when effort slips, when a player’s game drifts off its rails, a night upstairs can deliver the kind of jolt no speech ever could. Every so often, it even works. The humbled player returns, sharper and more focused, and the rest of the room takes note. The scramble for roster spots tightens, and internal competition rises.
Why Healthy Scratches Don’t Always Do What Coaches Think They Do
But the other side of the debate carries its own truth. Modern NHL players don’t bend easily to punishment. Many of them have longer résumés, larger salaries, and more years in the game than the coach sending them upstairs. For certain personalities, yanking them in and out of the lineup does little more than erode confidence. And when communication is thin — which it often is — a scratch can feel like exile rather than accountability. In those cases, nothing improves. Sometimes things worsen.
What I’ve Never Heard Anyone Talk About: The Quiet Night Upstairs
What struck me most about the panel’s discussion wasn’t what they said, but what they didn’t. They never touched the part of the scratch that matters most. That’s what actually happens with the removed player in the press box. I’ve sat in enough arenas, in enough roles, to know that what a player does up there varies wildly from team to team.
In many places, a scratch is left to watch the game beside another unlucky teammate. No guidance. No dialogue. No structure. Just sixty minutes of watching his team on the ice and feeling disconnected.
Turning a Scratch Into Something Useful
Obviously, I’m thinking like the teacher I am. Still, the irony is that the press box may be the best classroom in the rink — if a team uses it properly. From above, the game opens up. A player can see the spacing, the structure, the reads, the traps, and the breakdowns in a way that’s impossible at ice level.
Imagine a development coach sitting with the player, pointing out matchups, reviewing tendencies, and highlighting the very details the staff has been trying to correct. Picture the player taking (mental at least) notes, tracking patterns, seeing exactly how the system succeeds — and where they’ve been drifting off script. They do it on the bench all the time with video tablets anyway, so they’re used to it. Why don’t I see it used more upstairs?
The Missed Chance and Where the Real Question Lies
Too often, that doesn’t happen. The scratch becomes a silent statement of banishment instead of a guided lesson toward improvement. The player heads home frustrated, not enlightened. And the team misses an opportunity to turn a negative into something that could benefit both the player and the lineup.
So, the honest debate isn’t just whether scratches motivate. It’s what we choose to make of them. A healthy scratch can punish or teach. It can create distance or reinforce identity and purpose. For all the noise around who sits and why, the real story sits quietly in the rafters. Does the team treat the press box as a penalty or a place to grow?