Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock stands behind the bench as his team plays the Montreal Canadiens during the second period of an NHL hockey game, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015 in Toronto. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT

When you're the highest-paid coach in the league by a pretty decent margin, you're expected to be noticeably good at your job. Mike Babcock, however, isn't a guy who strikes the impartial viewer as too demonstrable.

But there's no doubting that he gets the job done in a lot of ways.

The results for the Maple Leafs are of course not there. This is a rebuilding team with a lot of youth and not necessarily a lot of talent. Not enough to make a difference, anyway. Heading into Thursday night's games, Toronto sits in a technical tie for last in the league, with 67 points (the Leafs and Canucks three games in hand on Edmonton, so congrats to the Oilers on another rotten season).

But you have to say that hiring Babcock to take over from interim coach Peter Horachek, and Randy Carlyle before him, has created a fairly positive environment in which the Leafs can operate moving forward as they continue to stockpile picks and prospects. That's because a rebuild with Carlyle in charge was going to involve a lot of tire-spinning, while one under Babcock clearly moves things forward.

Just as a jumping-off point, the Leafs are now rocking a positive score-adjusted possession number (50.8 percent corsi-for) for the first time since 2009-10. Now, you can say that doesn't much matter when the team is this bad, and that's probably true to an extent, but the on-boarding of so many young players should indicate that there's positive momentum building. About half of all 43 players that have gotten into at least a game for Toronto this season — and holy crap, that's a lot of players — are under the age of 25. You'd have to think that a pretty good chunk of those players probably aren't particularly NHL-ready, but the team as a whole is keeping its head above water after years of being one of the worst possession teams in the league.

In a rebuild such as this, that's not nothing.

Possession is a repeatable talent in individual players, but coaching has a major impact on it even at this level. There's no question that the farther away you get from the sport's biggest stage, the more of an impact systems have on overall team performance, but NHL coaches can still bear fruit in this regard. If they're good enough. Or bad enough.

Carlyle was an indefensibly bad coach who had few to no answers for why his team got badly out-possessed every night. Certainly, he had no idea whatever of how to fix that problem. Meanwhile, there are some coaches who manage talented players well and put them in a position to succeed, but who struggle when that talent goes away. One can have no doubt that Todd McLellan is a good coach, as the Oilers have improved (marginally) under his watch. But what his club is churning out now is obviously not too favorable in comparison with what the high-flying Sharks did when he was behind the bench and had a loaded roster at every position.

As far as the measurable impact Babcock has had on the Leafs, then, there are a number of ways to examine it. Again, the team is now worse in terms of wins and losses than it ever was under Carlyle, which is bad (depending on your point of view). But in nearly all other ways, it's holding steady or even improving. This despite having incrementally shipped out a decent amount of high-end talent from the summer to the trade deadline.

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