Maple Leafs Coaching Search Reaches Roy and Laviolette as Chayka Closes In

The Maple Leafs coaching search hits its in-person stage

The Maple Leafs coaching search has moved from a sprawling phone-call exercise into the room. Toronto is set to interview Patrick Roy and Peter Laviolette this week, two veteran bench bosses with Stanley Cup pedigree, as new general manager John Chayka narrows a list that reportedly began with roughly 15 virtual conversations. After firing Craig Berube on May 13, Chayka promised a thorough process rather than a quick hire, and the past three weeks have looked exactly like that.

This is the first hire that is fully Chayka's. He inherited the roster, the cap sheet and the No. 1 overall pick. The coach he picks will define how this version of the Leafs actually plays — and whether the franchise's long-standing structural problems get addressed or papered over again.

Why Berube is gone and what Chayka wants instead

Berube was hired to make the Leafs harder to play against, and for stretches he did. But the team missed the playoffs in 2025-26 for the first time in nearly a decade, and the front-office overhaul that brought in Chayka and senior adviser Mats Sundin made a coaching change close to inevitable. When ownership cleans house at the top, the bench rarely survives untouched.

Chayka has been explicit that he wants a modern, data-integrated operation, and his early front-office moves back that up. The coach he hires has to fit that vision: someone who can hold veterans accountable without losing the room, deploy a young core sensibly, and squeeze more out of a power play and penalty kill that swung games the wrong way down the stretch. We broke down the roots of the collapse in our 2025-26 season recap, and most of those problems are coaching-adjacent.

The case for Patrick Roy

Roy is the splashiest name on the board. The Hall of Fame goaltender was fired by the New York Islanders with four games left in the season, but his record there was respectable: 42-31-5 in 2025-26 and 97-78-22 across parts of three seasons after taking over from Lane Lambert midway through 2023-24. Before that he coached the Colorado Avalanche from 2013 to 2016, reaching the playoffs once and winning the Jack Adams in his rookie season behind the bench.

Roy's pitch is intensity and identity. He coaches an aggressive, north-south game and he is fearless about benching stars. For a Toronto core that has been criticized for going quiet in the biggest moments, that edge is the appeal. The risk is the flip side of the same trait — Roy's tenures tend to run hot, and Toronto is the most scrutinized market in hockey.

The case for Peter Laviolette

Laviolette is the steadier veteran option. He has been out of the league since the Rangers parted ways with him after 2024-25, but his résumé is enormous: one of the winningest American-born coaches in NHL history, a 2006 Stanley Cup with Carolina, and Cup Final appearances with both Philadelphia and Nashville. He has coached deep playoff teams in multiple markets and is known for installing structure quickly.

For a roster that needs to tighten up defensively without smothering its scorers, Laviolette's track record of getting teams to overachieve in the postseason is exactly the selling point. The question is whether a coach with a long history of three-to-four-year cycles is the right fit for a group that may be entering a retool rather than a final championship push.

The internal candidates Toronto already knows

Chayka has not limited the search to outside names. The Leafs interviewed two internal candidates: Derek Lalonde and Mike Van Ryn. Lalonde spent 2025-26 as an assistant under Berube, ran a penalty kill that finished eighth in the NHL at 81.2 per cent, coached the Detroit Red Wings for two seasons and won two Stanley Cups as a Tampa Bay assistant. He knows the room and the personnel cold.

Van Ryn just wrapped his third season as a Leafs assistant and has history with Berube dating to their St. Louis days from 2018-19 through 2022-23. He has also developed young players in the OHL with Kitchener and in the AHL with Tucson. Neither is the marquee name a fan base wants after a playoff miss, but continuity has value when the rest of the organization is being torn down and rebuilt at once.

The timeline pressure

There is a clock on this. The 2026 NHL Draft runs June 26 and 27 at KeyBank Center in Buffalo, and the Leafs own the first overall pick. Free agency opens July 1. A general manager generally wants his head coach in place before those dates so the bench has input on the players it will be asked to develop and deploy. With the draft three weeks out, the in-person interviews this week feel like the beginning of the end of the search rather than the middle.

Chayka also has roster fires to manage simultaneously — Max Domi's surgery complications have blown a hole in the middle of the lineup, and Toronto has been linked to centre help on the trade market. Whoever takes the job is walking into a summer of significant change. For more on the moves coming, see our look at the Leafs' structural needs this offseason and the live contracts and cap picture.

The pressure of the Toronto market

Any honest assessment of the Maple Leafs coaching search has to account for the job itself. Toronto is the most intensely covered hockey market on the planet, where every line combination, healthy scratch and post-game answer is dissected on television and talk radio for days. That scrutiny breaks some coaches and energizes others, and it is a legitimate filter in Chayka's process. A brilliant tactician who cannot manage the noise will not last, no matter how strong the underlying systems.

It cuts both ways for the front-runners. Roy has thrived in pressure cookers as a player and coach but has also had public flare-ups; the question is whether that fire reads as accountability or volatility in this market. Laviolette is unflappable and experienced with demanding fan bases, but he has never coached in a fishbowl quite like Toronto. The internal candidates, by contrast, already understand the daily grind of the city — a real, if unglamorous, advantage.

What the hire signals about the plan

The coach Chayka picks is also a statement about where he thinks this team is. A hire like Roy or Laviolette suggests a belief that the core can still win now with better structure and accountability. A bet on an internal option like Lalonde or Van Ryn would suggest continuity and patience while the front office reshapes the roster underneath. Neither is wrong, but they point in different directions, and fans will read the tea leaves accordingly. With the franchise simultaneously rebuilding its hockey-operations department — covered in our look at the Brackett and Hamilton hires — the coaching call is the most visible piece of a much larger reset.

What's next

Expect Toronto to complete its in-person interviews over the next week to ten days, with a hire plausible before the draft. Roy and Laviolette give Chayka two proven, contrasting options; Lalonde and Van Ryn give him a continuity fallback that protects player development. The decision will tell us a lot about how aggressive Chayka intends to be — and whether this is a reset, a retool or one more run at the same window. Track the picks the new coach will inherit on our draft hub.