Leafs Fire Craig Berube: A Banner-to-Basement Coaching Change

The decision lands on May 13

The Leafs fire Craig Berube on May 13, 2026, ending a two-year run that began with an Atlantic Division banner and finished with the worst Toronto season in a decade. New general manager John Chayka made the call, his first major move since taking over a front office that had already been torn down to the studs. Berube went 32-36-14 in 2025-26 — a 78-point campaign, down from the 108 points he posted in his debut year. That 30-point collapse is the largest single-season points decline in franchise history, and it cost a coach his job.

Chayka framed it as a reset rather than an indictment. "This decision is more reflective of an organizational shift and an opportunity for a fresh start than it is an evaluation of Craig," he said. That is the polite version. The blunter reading is that when an owner cleans house at the top, the bench almost never survives — and Berube was hired by a regime that no longer exists.

Year one was real, and that is what made this hard

Berube was not a bad coach in Toronto. He went 84-62-18 across two seasons, and the first of them produced a genuine identity the franchise had been chasing for years. The 2024-25 Leafs finished first in the Atlantic on a north-south, low-event style: forecheck, cycle, protect the middle, take away the easy chances. It suited a top-heavy roster that needed structure more than it needed creativity. For one season, the players bought it and the results followed.

That is the part that makes this firing more complicated than the standings suggest. This was not a coach who never had the room. He had it in year one. The question Chayka had to answer was whether the year-two collapse was a Berube problem or a roster problem — and his decision says he was not willing to bet another season on the answer.

Why year two frayed

The roster underneath him changed

The team Berube coached in October 2025 was not the team that won the division. Mitch Marner — a 102-point driver — was traded to Vegas in a sign-and-trade on July 1, with the cap savings spread across three cheaper forwards in Matias Maccelli, Dakota Joshua and Nicolas Roy. The plan was more balance, less top-heaviness. The execution required Auston Matthews to anchor it. We traced how that bet fell apart in our 2025-26 season recap, and the short version is that the replacements never added up to what left.

Matthews went down and the floor fell out

Matthews tore his MCL on March 14 in a knee-on-knee collision with Anaheim's Radko Gudas, ending his regular season at 27 goals and 26 assists in 60 games. By then the Leafs were already outside the playoff picture, which matters: the injury did not start the slide, it confirmed it. But it stripped away the one player capable of papering over the team's structural cracks, and a roster built to survive a Matthews dip could not survive a Matthews absence.

The system stopped holding

The most damning evidence came from Berube's own podium. Repeatedly through the winter he described a team playing too east-west, too freelance, too willing to turn pucks over through the neutral zone chasing plays that were not there. That is a coaching complaint as much as a personnel one. Year one, the group executed the structure. Year two, it abandoned it, and the coach could not get it back. Special teams slid in lockstep — the controlled environments where coaching shows up most clearly — and the goals-against numbers told the rest.

The Marner factor cuts both ways

Berube's defenders will point to Marner, and they are not wrong to. Losing a 102-point winger in the offseason would wreck most rosters, and the Leafs' middle six was visibly worse in 2025-26 than the one that won the Atlantic. No coach makes that math disappear. There is a real version of this story where Berube was handed a downgraded roster, lost his best player at the worst time, and got fired for circumstances outside his control.

But the counter is just as real. Most teams that shed a star winger do not finish fifth-last. William Nylander put up the best full season of his career — 26 goals and 46 assists in 59 games — on the same downgraded roster, which proves the talent that remained was capable of more than the standings showed. Somewhere between the Marner trade and the lottery odds, a coaching staff lost a group it had previously commanded. That gap is what Chayka was hired to fix, and it is why Berube became the first casualty.

This was always Chayka's call to make

The sequencing matters. Brad Treliving, the GM who hired Berube in the summer of 2024, was fired on March 30. Chayka and senior adviser Mats Sundin were installed in early May. A new president of hockey operations inheriting a coach hired by the man he replaced is one of the most predictable firings in sports — it is not personal, it is structural. Chayka wants a bench that reflects his blueprint: data-integrated, accountable, built to develop a young core around an expensive top end.

Keeping Berube would have meant asking a holdover coach to execute a vision he was not chosen for. Firing him, even with two years left on his contract and the salary that entails, lets Chayka pick the person who will define how this version of the Leafs actually plays. For a front office that just spent months convincing ownership it needed full control, half-measures behind the bench were never on the table.

The cost, and whether it is worth it

None of this is free. Berube carried multiple years of guaranteed money, and the Leafs are now paying him not to coach while paying his replacement to do the job. Toronto has also now cycled through Mike Babcock, Sheldon Keefe and Berube across the Matthews era — three accomplished coaches, three exits, one ongoing failure to get out of the second round before the wheels came off entirely this year. At some point the pattern stops being about the coaches.

The honest read is that Chayka is betting the problem was the fit, not the franchise. He may be right. A fresh voice with a clear mandate, a healthy Matthews, a likely high draft pick and a remade hockey-operations department is a meaningfully better starting point than the wreckage Berube was handed in October. But Toronto has told itself a version of this story before. The next hire has to be the one that finally breaks the cycle rather than extends it. You can track where the team sits against the rest of the conference on the standings page.

The Berube verdict

History will be kinder to Berube than the final season was. He arrived, installed a structure, and won a division with a roster that had never finished first under anyone else. Then the roster was gutted, his best player got hurt, and the group stopped playing the way that had worked. Whether that is a failure of coaching or a failure of circumstance depends on which half of his tenure you weigh more heavily — and reasonable people in Toronto are still arguing about it. We laid out that exact debate before the axe fell in our look at the Berube coaching decision.

What is not in dispute is that the result was untenable. A 30-point drop, a missed playoff berth, a fan base that had run out of patience and a new boss with no loyalty to the previous regime added up to one outcome. Berube is gone because the season was indefensible and because he was not Chayka's guy. Both things are true at once.

What's next

The firing kicked off a coaching search that quickly became the story of the offseason. Chayka has been explicit that he wants a thorough process, not a quick hire, and the early reporting suggested a wide net — roughly 15 virtual interviews before any in-person meetings. The names that surfaced range from established Cup-pedigree options to internal assistants who already know the room. With the 2026 NHL Draft on June 26-27 in Buffalo and free agency opening July 1, expect a hire before the draft so the new bench has input on the players it will inherit. The next coach walks into a healthy Matthews, a high pick and a front office rebuilt around one idea: that the structural problems of the last decade are fixable, and that the right voice behind the bench is part of the fix.