Two days into the Randy Carlyle era and already we’ve uncovered the breathtaking truth of Ron Wilson’s tenure as coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Wilson, fired Friday night after nearly four seasons of fruitlessness, would surely prefer his team’s ineptitude be chalked up to a long list of factors beyond his control. Blame the sieves in goal, the stiffs on the blue line, the scribes who build them statues.

The human excuse machine wasn’t entirely off base. But what’s far less flattering to Wilson’s legacy is that it took all of one game for his successor to pinpoint his team’s most fixable weakness. The way Carlyle appears to see it, the Leafs, along with being out of the playoff picture, are also out of shape. It’s as indefensible as it’s true.

LEAFS PHOTO GALLERY

That’s not to suggest that, say, Dion Phaneuf couldn’t hold his own in grandma’s jazzercise class. But fitness is relative. Put more precisely, Toronto’s NHLers aren’t in good enough shape to exploit their chief strength, which is speed.

Witness the way in which Carlyle rewarded the squad for snapping a six-game losing streak with a 3-1 win over Montreal in his debut behind the bench. Little more than 12 hours after their charter touched down in the GTA, the Leafs were back on the ice for a high-paced 85-minute practice, the final 20 minutes of which amounted to a bag skate that had some among the group occasionally doubled over in oxygen debt.

You’ll understand if the players, unaccustomed to such torturous time together, reacted with a mix of copious perspiration, laboured breathing, stoic silence and humorous post-practice speculation. This, after all, was Carlyle’s practice plan the day after a win.

“I don’t know what happens if we lose,” quipped Joey Crabb, the fourth-line forward.

Carlyle was unapologetic for the sweat-fest.

“That’s a normal practice for the hockey clubs we’ve coached in the past,” said Carlyle, who was joined for the first time by newly hired assistant Dave Farrish, a fellow former Leaf player. “There’s some things we need to work on.”

Somewhere, possibly on a tropical golf course, one assumes Wilson was cackling deviously at the thought of his old team’s newly burning lungs: “How do you like me now, suckers?!”

Still, the previous coach fancied his Leafs as a free-wheeling, fleeter-than-thou scoring machine. But somewhere along the way, after a brilliant opening month that saw them reside at the top of the league, they ran out of steam. That Wilson frequently indulged his troops in practices in which they barely broke a sweat may have been one of his grossest miscalculations. Instead of skating teams into the ground, their season ground to a halt with 10 losses in 11 games before the coaching change.

As Carlyle pointed out on Sunday: “They’re a skating team. If they skate in practice, they should be able to transfer that to the game. That’s part of the theory behind (the hard work).”

In other words, Wilson was running a peculiar kind of country club. The old coach was insufferable, but he scarcely made his team suffer the way they did on Sunday — in the way that builds endurance and jump and strength. As one club employee pointed out, the Leafs’ hardest practice of the season before Carlyle’s arrival came on Friday, in the hours before Wilson was relieved of his duties. Exactly why Wilson found his inner taskmaster at that moment is anyone’s guess.

Sunday’s practice was one of the most fascinating spectacles of the campaign. Carlyle began the workout by assigning an unlikely candidate to lead the team in assorted stretches. Asking Phil Kessel to loosen up the group is a bit like asking Mayor Rob Ford to teach a spinning class. There were smiles and chirps as Kessel, a doughy natural, ran his mates through a series of drag-foot lunges and high leg kicks that would have looked at home at a peewee houseleague game circa 1985.

“I think it would have been a little more normal if we weren’t laughing at Phil,” Crabb said. “Phil didn’t know any of the stretches.”

The fun appeared to end there. Players called it a “back-to-basics” training session. Carlyle had his charges work on breaking out of their own zone, a chronic weak spot in the Wilson-era arsenal. The Leafs also honed two-on-ones, two-on-twos. Carlyle and Farrish took turns at the white board, diagramming the new emphases.

The approach, said Carlyle, can be summed up thusly: “Play conservative, but still be an attacking hockey club.”

He continued: “Defensive zone coverage is an area every coach wants his team to improve on. We’re no different. We want to improve our defensive-zone coverage. We want to improve in our neutral-zone (play), not turn the puck over as much as we have in the past. In the offensive zone, don’t make those Hail Mary plays.”

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So Hail Mary plays are out. Curse Jesus workouts are in. That’s not to say the victories are about to arrive in droves. But it’s enough to make you wonder why Wilson, who liked to talk as though his team could skate circles around the competition on demand, didn’t ask for more frequent proof at the practice rink.

“Nothing wrong with a little hard work after a win,” said David Steckel, the third-line centre.

Said Crabb: “Obviously it’s more than we’re used to right now. But I think we’ll get used to it pretty quick.”

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