Mike Babcock will step behind the bench Thursday for his 1,000th game as an NHL head coach when Toronto takes on the New Jersey Devils at Air Canada Centre. But don’t make the mistake of thinking he’d planned or hoped for this to happen when he was a younger man. Indeed, like a lot of us, the 52-year-old grew up envisioning a future for himself entirely different from the job he holds today.
“Really, I thought I was going to be a professor at McGill University for the rest of my life,” said Babcock, who graduated from the Montreal university in 1986 with a degree in physical education.