This time last year the Toronto Maple Leafs were cresting the last wave of the mirage era, crouching on the edge of the playoffs. The night of Jan. 5, with Toronto in eighth place, Randy Carlyle was told he had been fired. Two days earlier, in Winnipeg, he’d given everyone a clue.

“You don’t always have the luxury to say that you’d like this player or that player or this type of player. That’s not the way it works,” Carlyle told reporters in Winnipeg. “How it works is you have an organization that provides you with players, and our job, as we’ve said all along, is just to coach ’em up.”

The day of the firing, former coach Ron Wilson said of certain long-term players, “you’d have to surmise that some of them might be uncoachable.” Poor interim coach Peter Horachek took the Leafs on an early West Coast trip, filled with afternoon practices and In-N-Out burgers as a reward afterwards, and they tried to play the right way — not skimming away to try low-percentage rushes, not spending the night hemmed in their own end. They really tried. It didn’t work. The Leafs would win two of 20 games after the firing, and plummet into the lottery.

Under head coach Mike Babcock, despite grabbing 33 of a possible 54 points since the start of November, the Leafs entered Tuesday night tied for 24th in winning percentage — or this being the NHL, winning and selected losing percentage — just behind past boom-and-bust teams like Calgary and Colorado, and the rising-from-the-dead Anaheim Ducks. And they’re in much, much better shape.

“I mean, top to bottom, new management, new coaching staff, we’ve got new trainers,” said forward Daniel Winnik, who was traded at last year’s deadline, and then signed back in Toronto. “And as a team, look, we were in a playoff position, and I mean, it caught up to us, the way we played. We didn’t make the playoffs, and we slid. And I think now it’s the opposite — we’re outside of the playoffs but I think we can make the playoffs. So it’s funny how things change.

“I mean, it’s tough to get people to change. Everyone says they want to change, but when you ask them to change, they don’t. I think it was an internal struggle with a lot of us; (Horachek) played that defence-first, pop-in-the-middle-and-go, or he tried to at least, but maybe we just weren’t built for it as a team. We were much more of a line-rush team. But, yeah, I thought we tried on that California trip.”

Winnik understands the way the Brendan Shanahan Leafs think now. When the struggling Ducks come up he notes their special teams and puck possession numbers, he says “they’re just on the wrong end of bad luck and shooting percentages right now,” so he gets it. Toronto was 27th in 5-on-5 Corsi last year — how many pucks you shoot at their net, vs. how many they shoot at yours — at 46.34 per cent. They’re sitting 12th right now, at 50.48 per cent, and the possession leap is nearly the difference between this year’s Leafs and this year’s league-leading Los Angeles Kings. The special teams are much more respectable. They’re not the most talented group, and only a handful are core players. But Babcock is showing that some players can be coached.

And the atmosphere around the team is . . . good? Yes. Good. On New Year’s Day, after a day off on New Year’s Eve, the Leafs didn’t drag in, bleary-eyed. GM Lou Lamoriello and Babcock probably wouldn’t have accepted anyone who did, and they knew it.

“We’re here two hours early, which is new from last year,” said defenceman Morgan Rielly on New Year’s Day, after an 11 a.m. practice. “I mean, I came in today at 9:10, which is two hours early, and there were 20 guys here, almost. Which is great. We want to be here. It’s not a chore to come to practice. We know what to expect.”

Privately, Leafs management is thrilled. They love how hard the team is playing. They’re fine with the spot in the standings, and they’re fine if it improves, which would put plenty of pressure on draft guru Mark Hunter, whose draft last year is part of what creates that standings Zen. There is a notion that fifth-round pick Dmytro Timashov was Sweden’s best player at the world juniors.

As for the future, well — there are options now. Don’t expect all-out manipulation, and don’t expect tanking. A player like Leo Komarov could be traded if he fetches a first-rounder, but for now, the feeling is that this team will decide what it is, honestly, organically. They will decide what they are, and the reaction from management will come accordingly. These are the new Leafs. A lot can change, in a year.

“You know, we all decide whether we’re going to have a good year ourselves,” said Babcock on New Year’s Day. “So all of us in this locker room have to decide that we’re going to have a good year, and we need to stick to the plan that we’ve implemented, and try to build a program that we can all be proud of. But I think we’ve done a lot of good things, I think our guys seem happy, I think they feel like they can walk around town and be proud of being a Leaf, and we’ve just got to keep building that.”

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