If there was ever a time when Mike Babcock might have some self doubt about the job he chose for himself, it could well be this week.

On Tuesday, his Maple Leafs were out-skated, out-hustled and outperformed by Jack Eichel and the Buffalo Sabres, a team that courted his services as much as the Maple Leafs.

On Friday, he'll return to Detroit, where he spent a decade behind the bench of the Red Wings, a team that didn't want him to leave.

Based on the way his team plays, he may be left wondering: "What have I gotten myself into?"

The Sabres are a young team that is ready to have their game and minds shaped by someone like Babcock's. They're a team eager to learn how to play the game the right way. Their core players are under 25. Their best are under 20. And Eichel looks like a leader-in-waiting, not a freelancer who wants to stand out above all others and be a superstar.

The Wings, of course, already know how to play a Babcock game. They are the closest franchise (the Kings are close) to having robot-like predictability: A second line right winger gets hurt, a call goes to Grand Rapids, and up comes a right winger to fill the void. Ditto fourth-line centre, defence.

That plays to a coach's ace-in-the-hole: playing time. If you don't play Babcock's way, he'll find a replacement somewhere in the system who will.

And that brings us to the Maple Leafs. Hardly anyone in the system even knows the system. It will probably take 40 games, maybe longer, for the best of them to get comfortable with it. And this team is older -- you know what they say about old dogs and new tricks.

Besides, most of them know they won't be around in a year's time, so why kill themselves pleasing a task master?

Call someone up from the Marlies, you say? They're learning the system too. (But they should get it sooner, as long as Sheldon Keefe is as good a coach as folks say he is.)

Babcock has referenced it a few times this pre-season, that the team reverts to its old habits when the going gets tough. Remember that -- it was pre-eason and the going was getting tough. Old habits die hard.

Babcock will only be allowed to take so much playing time away, only because the replacement -- a lesser skilled player in most cases --- probably won't know how to play the right way either.

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To recap: The Sabres are ready to learn. The Red Wings already get it. And Babcock chose the Maple Leafs, a team, as they say, that is two years away from being two years away.

GOT A QUESTION? Email me at askkevinmcgran@gmail.com and I'll answer it in Friday's mailbag.

