Chris Chelios blasts Mike Babcock, reveals more shocking details
How Babcock even got another NHL coaching job is astounding.
HockeyFeed
The reign of Mike Babcock as Columbus Blue Jackets head coach lasted not even two months, as he resigned from his position before training camp even began after revelations that he invaded player privacy by looking through their phones was released.
And one former player who has not been shy whatsoever to speak out against Babcock and his antics is former Detroit Red Wings defenseman Chris Chelios, whom Babcock infamously benched during the 2009 Winter Classic at Wrigley Field in Chicago in front of his friends and family.
By now, most fans know the stories of Babcock dating back to his time with the Red Wings in which he allegedly verbally assaulted forward Johan Franzen, leading the Swedish forward to later label Babcock as "the worst person I've ever met". During a recent appearance on the "Spittin' Chicklets" podcast, Chelios went into even more detail of those interactions between Babcock and Franzen as well as his own history with the maligned coach.
"It's just so unnecessary the things that did to players and how awkward and uncomfortable it could be," Chelios said. "You say that if you're winning, you can go to the rink and put up with it. Even when we were winning, it wasn't fun to come to the rink for a lot of players. Something keeps telling me that he wanted to get fired to take his money and run, I don't know what the settlement was this time and if he's getting paid. But he's smart like a fox, this guy."
"There are too many good people in hockey who have to put up with someone like him," Chelios said. "Johan Franzen comes to mind, what he put that poor kid through when he was suffering through the concussion thing. Literally, he was calling him into his office once a week to call him a fat pig and say that your teammates hate you and why don't you just quit."
At the time of the 2009 Winter Classic, Chelios was 47 years of age. Would he have confronted Babcock directly for not playing him or requested a trade had it been a decade prior?
"Honestly at that point in my career, I didn't want to move my family," he said. "I didn't want to move my family, I loved Detroit. Thank God that Kenny Holland and Jim Nill and the Ilitches had my back. They couldn't tell Babs to play me or not, but they could say you're not going to get rid of him. I knew the secretary working right outside of Kenny Holland's office, so any time that Babs would go into Kenny's office to have a meeting, she'd hear everything. Babs was trying to get me traded.
"If I'd have been ten years younger, I'd have asked to been traded and told him to beat it and to eff off."
He later continued:
”There's no reason at all that Babcock should have put these guys in this position. It's divisive, and that's what he did. So hockey players are hockey players board each other. And the good thing is it happened right before training camp. So that's good that I guess he was in Traverse City, and the next day he was gone. So the timing was perfect that this all came out."
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