When Sheldon Keefe won his first championship as a coach there were more than 2,400 fans cheering on his team at the Pembroke Memorial Centre. That was in the spring of 2007 when Keefe’s Lumber Kings defeated the Nepean Raiders in the fifth game of the Central Canada Hockey League’s championship series. The game was sold out, an electrified fan base as good as you will find at this level of hockey, cheering until the final seconds of the clock wound down.
Fast forward 13 years and Keefe has reached the pinnacle of coaching in hockey but he is experiencing his first post-season in isolation. No fans are watching his Toronto Maple Leafs in their Stanley Cup qualifier best of five series in Toronto. Instead the players, coaches, a few media people and some rink staff are the only witnesses to the live games inside Scotiabank Place, a facility that holds almost 20,000 fans.
The irony of Keefe’s first opportunity to coach in elimination games in the National Hockey League can’t be lost in a season like none other in the history of the National Hockey League. To quote a famous Chinese proverb, “We live in interesting times.” That proverb is actually considered to be a curse and while Keefe wouldn’t consider the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to be an omen for things to come, he has to be scratching his head about the situation he and the rest of the NHL is in.
Living and playing in a bubble, playing games that were made for TV and trying to find ways to motivate his players in an atmosphere that quite frankly has no atmosphere has to be challenging for all teams, but even more so for a rookie NHL coach who happens to be the coach of the league’s most storied franchise. But, Sheldon Keefe is used to facing obstacles. His journey to the NHL is an incredible story of perseverance, one that his opponent respects. Columbus Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella, who coached Keefe for parts of three seasons when he entered the NHL as a player with the Tampa Bay Lightning, knows that Keefe is a fierce competitor.
On the eve of the Leafs-Blue Jackets qualifier series, Tortorella told NHL.com, “I wish nothing but the best for that guy, other than this series.” When Keefe was elevated from the Leafs AHL farm team, the Marlies, to take over the bench of the Leafs in November of last year, Tortorella was among the first NHL coaches to reach out to Keefe to congratulate him. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for that guy. He’s one of the most competitive players I’ve coached. When he played, he knew one way, and that was to play hard,” Tortorella told the media.
Indeed, Keefe is competitive. It is what drove him to win an unprecedented five consecutive CCHL titles with the Lumber Kings, capping it with Pembroke’s only national junior A championship in 2011. His rise from Pembroke to the Maple Leafs with stops in Sault Ste Marie and the American Hockey League where he guided the Marlies to their first Calder Cup championship is all you need to know about his determination.
So, in this crazy time in world history, there is also some irony that Keefe’s first post-season NHL coaching experience comes against a ‘tough as nails’ coach who he tried to mirror when he got his coaching start. Now 39 years old, Keefe admits that his experience playing for Tortorella in Tampa played a significant role in the approach he initially took when he started to coach. Keefe left the Lightning the year before they won a Stanley Cup championship in 2004 under Tortorella, but he was there to witness how Tortorella handled his young stars like Vincent Lacavalier.
When he started coaching in Pembroke, discipline became a foundation for his success. He expected a lot from his players and he kept tight reins on them. He was tough, but his approach and of course winning helped build his reputation and earned him the respect of the hockey world. Now, he is in the “big show,” but eerily the experience is playing out much differently that anyone would have imagined.
Interesting times indeed. For Sheldon Keefe, it’s just one more wrinkle in a complicated life story that has put him in the epi-centre of a pandemic bubble that has the top hockey league in the world playing in August in an effort to complete a season that had to be paused for more than four months. You can’t make this stuff up, but that’s part of the intrigue of Sheldon Keefe’s path to the NHL. Nothing has come easy.