Considering his name had barely come up in discussions of candidates to become the next head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs, the news of Jim Hiller’s hire caught just about everybody outside the organization off guard.
Hiller had been an assistant coach in the NHL for a decade before getting his first head job in Los Angeles. There, he only coached one full season in 2024-25 after taking over the job as an interim coach partway through 2023-24 and being fired with 23 games left in the 2025-26 season. Hiller coached the Kings in the 2024 and 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs, where they were eliminated in five and six games by Edmonton in the first round.
While the results weren’t always great when Hiller coached in Los Angeles — they were 24-21-14 and out of a playoff spot when he was fired on March 1 — they tended to drive play in a meaningful way with fairly middling rosters.
Hiller has been with the Leafs before, working as an assistant to Mike Babcock from 2015-16 to 2018-19 and that overlapped with my time in the organization when I was the Marlies’ video coach. We spent a decent amount of time with the Leafs’ staff because we shared a building, and so after watching Hiller’s career through that time — and after having some background conversations with others — I’ve put together some of my initial thoughts on Toronto’s new head coach.
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• First off, Hiller can communicate. He’s on the serious side, but is capable of turning on his personality for the players, and with those tools he should be able to manage both them and the media well. He handles himself like a professional, and all that stuff is at least part of the battle here.
• I like that he’s been around the NHL over the past dozen years, and that he’s got head coaching experience. It was important to hire someone who’s had the pulse on the day-to-day of the league. Hiring a first-time NHL boss would’ve been a bit too much “new” for an organization that has plenty of that elsewhere.
• Coaches have historically done best in their second stop as a head guy, and here we are — this is Hiller’s second head coaching job, a chance to chart a new course with that experience in his back pocket.
• I had originally tweeted a knee-jerk reaction about the hiring that in retrospect used a phrase wrong. I said Hiller was not “particularly creative,” but after chatting with people, I didn’t get that part right. He’s open-minded and has probably pushed to do more to open up the game than shut it down, despite what the numbers – often influenced by his rosters – may reflect.
He’s run a hockey analytics company (TruPerformance), and cares about the data (which is how he met and got hired by Babcock in the first place). That connection to the data is obviously a big part of what put him over the top with Chayka and this management group.
• Hiller has a playing background that includes 63 NHL games, more in the minors, and six years overseas, so he can blend that analytic bent with his playing experience. He’s able to connect to players with this stuff, which should in theory help him get across the game plan he wants to implement.
• The more I think about it, it’s interesting to consider what Hiller’s game plan might be with the Maple Leafs.
As mentioned, some data-leaning fans expect that he’ll be defensive-minded, and some stats do bear that out. But by all accounts Hiller loves the offensive side. That’s likely part of the reason why Auston Matthews and William Nylander are OK with this hire — they know he’s not defence-obsessed, and should give them some of their freedom back after what was a pretty burdensome north-south game the past two seasons.
• Now, is it a good thing to hire a coach who the stars already approve of, and who will likely try to let them go and do their thing? I guess that depends on if you think these guys needed to be whipped into shape, or if a guy like Matthews needs the shackles off to re-establish himself as the game-changing player he once was.
That second thing – Matthews able to get going again, perhaps not as a shutdown centre this time – is probably a good thing. Nylander never listened to the “defence first” stuff anyway, so I’m not sure this will affect him much.
• I do think you’ll see DJ Smith join Hiller here in Toronto. Smith can layer on the defensive aspect to what the Leafs’ new coach will want to build. They were together in Toronto before and have a good relationship.
• The more I think about Hiller, the more it makes sense. The initial shock of the hire came from not hearing his name in the conversation much, and that since he’d been in Toronto previously, maybe that would preclude him from coming back.
But Hiller’s Kings teams won more than they lost, they just ran into the Edmonton Oilers in the playoffs both years, and I’m not sure any coach could’ve pushed those Kings rosters past prime Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl.
To drive it home, Hiller coaches with an analytical bent, he’s got experience, and he just checks a ton of boxes that you can see the Leafs’ brass liking.
• I think Leafs fans wanted something splashy, a risk. Maybe first-time coach Joe Pavelski, maybe a brash and confident guy like Patrick Roy. Both would’ve been really fun, and certainly could’ve worked. But they may not have panned out, too, and so I think this eliminates the potential outlier seasons at either ends of the spectrum.
If one thing is for sure, it’s that the Leafs got some things wrong from behind the bench last season. They were inflexible and operated too much on gut feel, the latter of which is impossible to rely on as information point numero uno every day. Even just a return to listening to data such as “which lines play well when they’re together” could unlock better success for the Leafs.
• I expect this to be a breath of fresh air for the analytics department that produces reports each day for the coaching staff. All this should tap into the Leafs’ “latent upside” that Chayka has referred to without taking any earth-shattering risks.
Maybe Jim Hiller is not the most fun hire the Leafs could’ve made, but they’re pushing back against the factors that saw them drop out of relevance last season. Climbing back up the Hill(er) will be a battle, but at least they’re moving in the right direction.