Professor’s Cup of Coffee: Morning Thoughts on Joe Pavelski as Leafs Coach
I haven’t had one of these morning coffee posts in a bit. Travel gets in the way, life gets busy, and hockey keeps moving whether you’re ready for it or not.
But sitting here this morning, what stuck with me wasn’t really the Maple Leafs hiring Jim Hiller. That’s just the transaction part of the game. What stuck with me was something different. The space around Joe Pavelski in the middle of all of it.
Part One: The Coaching Job Isn’t the Whole Story.
There’s always this moment in hockey that we don’t talk about enough. It’s not the hire, not the signing, not the announcement. It’s the pause right before it becomes real. That’s where Pavelski was.
And I keep thinking that’s actually the most human part of the whole story. Because he wasn’t just looking at a coaching job with the Maple Leafs. He was looking at what that job would do to everything else — his time, his family. His son’s hockey path. All the things that don’t show up in a press release but absolutely shape the decision.
That’s the part that felt real to me. We talk about hockey like it’s clean and linear. Like decisions happen in isolation. But they don’t. There’s always another conversation happening in the background — the life conversation.
And Pavelski didn’t run from that. He thought about it and tried to figure out if it actually fit.
Related: Why Canadian Hockey Fans Still Believe After 30 Years of Waiting.
Part Two: Pavelski’s Space Between “Almost” and “Done.”
And funny enough, that same idea applies to the Maple Leafs, too. They made their hire. Jim Hiller gets the job. That’s the headline, that’s the final line in the story.
But the more interesting part is everything around it. All the names considered, the conversations had, the direction they almost went, the people who were in the room for a moment and then weren’t. That’s where you sometimes learn what an organization actually values.
It isn’t in what they announce. It’s in what they leave behind.
And Pavelski feels like one of those “almost” stories. He’s a former player who stepped close enough to a different future that you can see it clearly, even if he didn’t walk into it. Maybe he coaches someday. Maybe he doesn’t. That part isn’t really the point this morning.
The point is that there’s always a space in hockey between what happens and what could have happened. And sometimes, that’s where the most human stories live.
Pavelski could have been the Maple Leafs coach. Imagine how different that story might look.