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In his more than four years as Maple Leafs coach, it’s hard to recall Mike Babcock ever dropping the kind of hammer that his successor Sheldon Keefe did over the weekend.



Babcock once relegated Mitch Marner to fourth-line status when he was a 19-year-old rookie and did the same occasionally with William Nylander when he was young in his NHL career. But rarely, if ever, did Babcock execute the kind of old-school benching that Keefe deployed — in only his 14th game as Leafs coach — with Nylander and Kasperi Kapanen on Saturday evening.



Nylander and Kapanen got a team-low three shifts in the second frame of a 4-1 Leafs win over Detroit, and none over the final 13 minutes of the period. Even fourth-liners such as Dmytro Timashov and Frederik Gauthier hopped out there more often.



Afterward, Keefe...