In his first NHL training camp, Babcock sidelined three well-liked veterans: Jason York, Denny Lambert and German Titov. Lambert and York said they arrived at the Ducks training camp to find their names had been removed from their stalls and gear cleared out. Babcock told them they could not be around the team at all, they said. The players practiced alone on empty ice in the afternoon.

At the time, Lambert’s two-year-old son was in the hospital with a broken femur; he said he wouldn’t have left his family in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, if the Ducks had told him he was unwanted. Lambert said he asked Babcock why he’d been removed. Was it his performance on the ice? An issue in the locker room? Babcock told Lambert there was nothing he could do to change his mind.

“There was no respect at all,” Lambert said. “I would never treat anyone like that.”

When York confronted Babcock, he was told it was just an attempt to inject some leadership with the AHL group, York said. But after several days, the players were banished from the rink. Even when Lambert later hitched a ride on the team plane so he could return to his family, he sat away from the other players, feeling he was no longer welcome.

“It’s not just you that you’re playing for. You’re playing for your family, you’re playing for your kids, right?” said York. “He took my livelihood like it was nothing.”

“Tony Martensson, a young center who played in the Ducks organization with Cincinnati before being called up to the NHL in 2003, told Swedish newspaper Expressen in February, 2021, that Babcock derided him for being too small and weak. Before one game during the 2003-04 season, Martensson was part of pregame warmups, but when he came off the ice and into the locker room, Babcock told him that he wasn’t playing. Martensson started changing, but Babcock then said in front of the team: “What the hell are you doing?” He told Martensson to change away from the team in the shower.

“In essence, he’s a bully,” Martensson told Expressen.

“Later that fall, in October 2015, Frankie Corrado was picked up off waivers by the Leafs from Vancouver. Corrado was excited to play for Babcock, knowing he had a reputation for helping players reach their potential.

“I have no idea who you are,” Corrado remembers Babcock telling him when they first met. He told Corrado to meet him at his office at the Leafs training facility the next day at 8 a.m. Corrado arrived early and knocked on Babcock’s door, but the coach told him he didn’t have time to see him. Corrado waited for an hour and a half, but Babcock never made time for him.

Corrado saw little ice time with the Leafs over the next few weeks, spending most games as a healthy scratch. But during practices, Babcock would quietly instruct him to go first in drills, so he’d have to push past star players in line — breaking hockey decorum — while awkwardly trying to explain that he was doing so per the coach’s instruction. Corrado felt Babcock was attempting to “sewer” him with his teammates.

Corrado said he later experienced panic attacks and threw up regularly before games because of anxiety, which he never experienced before playing for Babcock.

“It was cruel. It went on way too long and it did way too much damage to me,” he said. “I think he loves f—ing with people’s heads. I really do.”

“Early in the 2016-17 season center Peter Holland lost his position to minor league call-up Byron Froese. Hoping to discuss the demotion, Holland went to Leafs practice early. He found Babcock eating his breakfast, and the coach told him he’d find him as soon as he was done. Nearly an hour later Babcock called him into his office.

“You’re here to remind me that you’re still on the team. But you’ve lost your job, and all you can do right now is show up in practice,” Holland recalls Babcock saying. “Now tell me what you came here to tell me, so you can go home and tell your family and your agent that you said what you wanted to say.”

Before a Western Canada road trip that November, Leafs general manager Lou Lamoriello told Holland he’d be staying back while the team worked out a trade for him to a market where he could get more playing time. At a news conference in Edmonton the next day, Babcock gave reporters the impression it was Holland’s decision for him to not travel with the team.

“(Holland) met with Lou, had his agent on the phone and decided he wasn’t coming on the trip,” Babcock said.

Holland said Lamoriello treated him professionally, but Babcock did not. “I’ve played for hard-ass coaches who I really like and respect — because they still treat you like a person. My experience with Babs was that he doesn’t treat you like a human being,” Holland said.”

Early in Babcock’s tenure with the Leafs, after team trainers completed player evaluations, ranking work ethic on a three-level scale — red, yellow and green — he called a meeting with players and the team’s training staff and projected the red reviews on a wall for all to see. Training staffers said they had been led to believe their evaluations would be confidential.

In the Leafs office, Babcock was known to chastise support staff workers if his routine was derailed or the environment didn’t meet his standards, former players and employees said. He often focused on one person in the office each day and hounded them repeatedly.

“When you work for Babs everyone is on their toes. No one is spared,” said one former staffer.

He loved to create chaos and uncertainty. Why would you put the training staff in that position. Why would anyone in the Oilers organization feel protected if Babcock is the coach?

Franzen told Expressen that during a playoff game against Nashville in April 2012, Babcock verbally assaulted him. “I get the shivers when I think about it,” he said. “But that was just one out of a hundred things he did. The tip of the iceberg.”

Franzen described Babcock as meticulous and well-prepared, adept at putting a team together and getting buy-in from players. “But then, he’s a terrible person, the worst I have ever met. He’s a bully who was attacking people,” Franzen told the newspaper. “It could be a cleaner at the arena in Detroit or anybody. He would lay into people without any reason.”

Franzen said that starting in 2011, he became terrified of being at the rink as “verbal attacks” on him and others continued. Chris Chelios, a Hall of Fame defenseman who played for Babcock in Detroit, was appalled by how Babcock treated Franzen. “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,” Chelios told the “Spittin’ Chiclets” podcast.”

“He has publicly stated his side of the Marner and Franzen incidents multiple times, but brings up both, and doesn’t hesitate to share his thoughts again nearly two years later. Of the criticisms levelled against him in their wake, he says that “some of this stuff doesn’t add up” and contends that if he were unfit to be a head coach, he wouldn’t have managed to hold down a position in Detroit for 10 seasons or been hired to coach Olympic and World Cup squads.

He’s asked to clarify what it is that doesn’t add up. “The reality is, after the fact, especially in today’s social media world, you can say whatever you want,” he begins. “It’s not my job to go out and say, ‘No, that didn’t happen.’”

He then says the Marner incident didn’t happen in the way it’s been portrayed. “That’s a complete farce the way it’s talked about and the way it happened. It didn’t happen like that,” he says. “I asked the kid to do something. He did it. The next player came in … So did I ever try to put Mitch Marner in a tough place? Mitch Marner played great for Mike Babcock.”

Babcock says he feels bad about the way Franzen remembers him, but the long-time Detroit forward’s words don’t seem to weigh too heavily on him given their gravity. “If I’ve done something wrong, I have to own that,” he says. “But I’m good with my life. I’m good with my moral fiber. I’m good with my family.”

When asked what he’s learned over the past two years, whether he has any takeaways from that period, Babcock says “sure,” before reemphasizing his previous point: “It’s real simple for me. Anything in my life that I’ve done that I should be feeling bad about and I should apologize for, I’m good with that. I have to own it and I should do that. But some of the math doesn’t add up. It just doesn’t.”