The life of an AHL coach is unforgiving. In a sense, you’re working towards your own demise. The more players you graduate to the NHL, the weaker you make your team and the harder it is to win games.

That was definitely the case for Laval Rocket head coach Sylvain Lefebvre this season.

He lost 12 players to the Canadiens, leaving him with a dearth of talent on the roster. Consequently, over 50 players wore a Rocket jersey this season, with countless professional tryouts and ECHL call-ups filling the voids left by an NHL team that was in constant need of reinforcements. Only a handful of players that started the season with the team remained on the roster as they entered the final weekend of the schedule.

“The role of an AHL affiliate is to help the NHL team,” said Lefebvre. “When players get called up we want them to be ready. In that sense, this year was a success. Many of them spent a lot of time in the NHL. We lost them early on and they never came back.

“If you had asked anyone in the organization if we predicted having a season like this in terms of how many players got injured in the NHL, and that guys like [Mark] Streit and [Brandon] Davidson left, people would have told you that’s not the plan.”

If we examine this season in a vacuum, he’s right. You could qualify this season as a success from a graduation standpoint. It’s understandable that the Rocket went from one of the hottest teams in the AHL at the start of the year to last place in the league, seeing as they lost their captain, the majority of their top six forwards and several defencemen over the course of the year.

“To start, we were excited,” said Lefebvre. “But that’s the reality of the American Hockey League. This was really an extreme case this season.”

However, this isn’t Lefebvre’s first season as head coach of the Canadiens’ AHL affiliate. In fact, it’s his sixth year at the helm of the team.

And the results, or lack thereof, speak for themselves.

Throughout 456 regular season games, Lefebvre’s team has won just 188 times and has qualified for the playoffs once. They lost their only playoff series in 2016-17 against Tampa Bay’s AHL affiliate, the Syracuse Crunch.

Any way you cut it, winning a grand total of one playoff game in six years is a poor, if not embarrassing result.

The frustration of so many fruitless seasons would be mitigated if the team managed to graduate a reasonable amount of players to the NHL throughout the years, but until this season, that wasn’t the case.

“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t many sleepless nights,” said Lefebvre. “Building chemistry is really tough under these circumstances, and there are a lot of other aspects that many don’t keep in mind. Some guys weren’t getting called up, others were, and that can have an effect on players. We had to deal with that without losing sight of the team’s ultimate goal.”

When the affiliate was located in St. John’s or Hamilton, the ultimate goal was singular: graduate players to the NHL. And while that aspect of Montreal’s farm team wasn’t particularly effective, most Canadiens fans didn’t pay close attention to the team’s record.

Now that the team is located in Laval, there’s not only more attention on the players, but on the team’s success as well. Many are calling for a coaching change at the AHL level, something that Lefebvre acknowledges. However, he’s adamant that those outside the organization don’t necessarily see the big picture.

“They don’t have all the information,” Lefebvre said. “Game plans are always about getting a win. It takes execution and adjustments from the coaches, but our goal isn’t to finish in the basement. We’re all competitors. We haven’t slept very well this year, in the sense that we want to bring success to the team. I’d be lying if I said we didn’t learn every day.”

There was little to no success from a team standpoint this year. Even worse, the Rocket had the worst home record in the AHL, winning just 10 of their games at Place Bell. They also had the worst penalty killing in the league at 77.4 percent.

Despite the pitiful home record, the Rocket still finished the season among the top ten teams in terms of attendance, averaging almost 6,700 fans per game.

“There haven’t been many games in which the guys didn’t work hard,” said Lefebvre prior to fan appreciation night. “The fans respect that.”

But every fan has a breaking point, and we saw a decline in attendance as the season went on. The excitement of a new team quickly faded once the losing culture took hold.

It’s hard to fault fans for not showing up in droves for a team that’s primarily composed of a few veterans and a handful of unknown players that have little to no hockey pedigree. This was, after all, the worst season since Lefebvre took over as head coach.

If the Rocket are to succeed longterm, they’ll need to build a winning team. Marc Bergevin is aware of this, and his moves last summer were an indication that he wanted his new AHL affiliate to start off strong. But his lack of attention towards the Canadiens roster ended up costing him, given that he had to pilfer his AHL team endlessly throughout the year to compensate for a lack of depth at the NHL level.

As for Lefebvre’s future, which remains in doubt, he was quick to shut down any rumours of a possible firing or promotion to the NHL.

“I have another year left on my contract,” he said. “Currently, my job is being a coach in Laval and I’m doing the best I can. If things change, I’ll adjust to the situation.”

Truth be told, most of Lefebvre’s explanations for the team’s failures this season are legitimate. However, every team in the AHL loses players, every team has to deal with injuries, and every team has to turn to players with less experience throughout the year.

Not every team wins just one playoff game in six years. Not every team has a .400 win percentage year after year. Not every team constantly fails to adapt to the ever-changing landscape that is the AHL.

It’s no surprise that Lefebvre and his coaching staff have had several sleepless nights. They’ve earned them.

(Top photo credit: Laval Rocket Hockey)