West Coast hockey gets short thrift in Toronto, until one of their coaches potentially gets hired by MLSE, so it can sometimes be tough to form opinions on the people that operate in the relative vacuum of the 10PM EST puck drop. In those cases, it's best to get your information straight from the horse's mouth or, in this case, the blogger's fingers before it gets wrung through the Negative Nellies in the media. This is the first of a few West Coast perspectives on the Leafs' apparent new coach.

One of the features that I did ocassionally last year, and will hopefully resurrect, involved reaching out to fellow bloggers to answer five questions. For this first look at Ron Wilson I am glad to have Mike Chen contributing his knowledge. You can read his work on the Sharks and the NHL at his personal blog as well as the Battle of California. He's also a contributor to FOXSports.com so he's kind of a big deal.

It looks like Ron Wilson might be the kind of coach that this team has been crying out for since Pat Burns left the team. There is definitely another side to all of the negative press that Wilson has been receiving and some of it seems to fit in well with the rebuilding Leafs. I especially like the comment that Wilson could work to weed out the young players that can't hack it. Don't ask for whom the Taco Bell tolls Wellwood because it tolls for thee!

I think the thing with Wilson, and Caps fans will probably tell you the same thing, is that he's a combination of innovation and attitude that has a relatively short life span. In his first full season with the Sharks, he got a Joe Thornton-less team to buy into a hard-skating puck-possession game that went to the Conference Finals. The problem is the attitude. While Wilson is a great quote for the media, he's also got a really snarky personality that sometimes makes him seem like a player's coach and sometimes makes him seem like a big jerk. I got the sense that this confused players, especially some of the younger ones, and made them basically walk on eggshells. He's really smart, but sometimes I wonder how much of what he says is calculated and how much is just his ego spitting out sarcasm.

Tactically, he's pretty damn smart and he's not afraid to change things drastically. The problem with him is that he's also really stubborn, and if he believes that something will work, he will stick with it even when it's fairly clear that it isn't and won't work. So his effectiveness is kind of like a bell curve that's been significantly pushed to the left.

It's a mixed bag. The great thing about Wilson is that he will give you an opportunity to prove yourself in a critical situation, and if he sees you rise to the occasion, he'll ride you till there's no tomorrow. Sharks fans can tell you about how he transformed the skilled-but-enigmatic Alex Korolyuk into a speedy and reliable player in a single shift: with the game on the line in a critical penalty kill situation, he tapped Korolyuk on the shoulder and told him that his team was relying on him to kill that penalty (even though he wasn't a regular penalty killer). Korolyuk took that opportunity to transform his game and was probably the Sharks' best forward the rest of that season before he went to Russia.

On the other hand, Wilson isn't afraid to punish -- or almost humiliate -- players both on the bench and in the media. He's not like Ted Nolan, who can cultivate inspiration in just about anyone. He's not quite as brutal as Mike Keenan, either, whose jerkness beat some players down but created superstars in Chris Pronger, Jeremy Roenick, and Joe Thornton. I get the sense that Wilson will make one of
Toronto's underachieving players a great but not spectacular player, but he will also shellshock some of the younger guys who aren't quite sure how to deal with his approach.