Iron Mike Keenan weighs in on the Leafs, regrets, tough love and affairs of the heart

It was a medical diagnosis that amounted to breaking sports news. This past spring, Mike Keenan, the legendary hockey coach, underwent cardiac surgery to fix an aneurysm in his ascending aorta. Along with saving Keenan’s life, the procedure confirmed an anatomical fact considered improbable in the dressing rooms he once ruled. The man known as Iron Mike does, indeed, have a heart.
“I know a lot of my players have wondered for a long time if I had one at all,” Keenan said with a laugh during an interview this past week. “Well, I guess (the operation) proved it.”
Jokes aside, there’s no denying cold-blooded ruthlessness was a big part of Keenan’s identity during his rise to NHL heights. Ranked fifth on the all-time playoff win list, he won a landmark Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers in 1994, breaking what was then the league’s longest championship drought. He took three other teams to the Stanley Cup final. He coached Canada to wins in the 1987 and 1991 Canada Cup. And though Keenan last held an NHL job in 2009, ensuing stints in the KHL and Europe have seen him coach in five decades.
Now 74, Keenan was set to coach Italy’s national team at the 2026 Olympics in Milan until his recent dalliance with a cracked chest led to a role as a consultant.
For all that, he’s perhaps best remembered for his reliance on inflammatory mind games in the name of dressing-room motivation. The list of historically offended parties is long. Brendan Shanahan, the Maple Leafs president and Hall of Fame player, once said of Keenan: “There’s not a more unforgiving person when you are in his doghouse.”
Curtis Joseph, the otherwise mild-mannered goaltender, was once so enraged during a meeting in Keenan’s office that he picked up something off the desk and threw it at him.
Brett Hull, the NHL’s fifth all-time leading goal scorer, once said of Keenan: “I’ll go to my grave saying he didn’t have a clue what he was doing.”
But most of a half-century since he caught the coaching bug as a high school teacher who oversaw a champion box lacrosse team at Toronto’s Don Mills Collegiate, he remains largely unapologetic for his reputation for rankling talent. As he writes in “Iron Mike: My Life Behind the Bench,” his new memoir: “Winning requires abnormal behaviour.”
Whether than meant goading Joseph for being out of shape or ticking off the likes of Shanahan and Hull with incessant prodding, Keenan remains of the firm belief that most of what he did was essential to the pursuit of victory.
“I know I was hard on a lot of players, but the goal was always to make them better for themselves, both to realize their potential and for the team to win,” Keenan writes in “Iron Mike,” penned with Scott Morrison.
As 1994 Rangers captain Mark Messier writes in the foreword: “I know (Keenan) rubbed some guys the wrong way, and he could be a hard-ass, but many of those guys who were pissed at him still performed at the highest level of their career …. I liked that he was not afraid of confrontation if it was going to make the team better.”
Not that Keenan doesn’t have regrets. Looking back on his career, he said he could have “turned down the heat” on more than one situation. His relationship with Hull, in particular, is one he’d gladly do over.
“I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t handle (Hull) differently,” Keenan said.
Keenan, mind you, will still happily spar with disgruntled former players. Informed that longtime pro Robyn Regehr recently declared him “probably the worst coach I’ve had in the NHL,” citing a penchant for overplaying stars and taking the proverbial “whip” to lesser lights, the coach fired back.
Keenan pointed out that the best player on those Flames teams, Jarome Iginla, thanked him by name during his induction speech at the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2021. He added that the Flames made the playoffs in both of Keenan’s seasons in Calgary, then missed the post-season five straight times after he was fired in 2009.
“There was a big conflict in the room with Robyn Regehr and many of his teammates, and I won’t get into the details,” he said. “But it’s interesting that two teammates (Iginla and Regehr) who played on the same team with the same coach see things so differently, and only one of them is in the Hall of Fame.”
Keenan, who was born in Bowmanville, spent formative years in the GTA, attending the University of Toronto and teaching high school in Don Mills and at Forest Hill Collegiate. And though he never counted the Leafs among his NHL stops, of which there were eight, he said he once discussed the Toronto job with then-team president Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goaltender. He knew he wasn’t destined for the gig when one of Dryden’s first questions was about the coach’s notorious penchant for pulling goalies.
“Dryden was upset about that strategy,” Keenan said.
One of his career highlights happened down the road in Hamilton, in the deciding game of the 1987 Canada Cup final against the Soviet Union. With 1:36 remaining and the score tied, Canada stared down a defensive-zone faceoff. Instead of sending out Messier, his best faceoff man, Keenan tossed out three other centremen: Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Dale Hawerchuk. Those three had never played together. Even the defencemen were offensively inclined: Paul Coffey and Larry Murphy.
“Putting out all that offensive talent in the defensive zone isn’t something a lot of coaches would do,” Keenan writes in his book, “but I was coaching to win, not survive that shift and make it into overtime.”
After Hawerchuk won the faceoff and Lemieux chipped the puck past an ill-advised pinch from Soviet defenceman Igor Kravchuk, Gretzky led the famed three-on-one rush that ended in Lemieux’s winning snipe.
For all that, Keenan might not have even been on the bench if Canada’s players had their way. There were internal calls for his firing after the tournament opener, a 4-4 tie against Czechoslovakia. With the players giving up their summers to play and their families in town to share the experience, Keenan mandated a post-game beeline to the team hotel and a strict curfew, with a prohibition on the players seeing loved ones.
“I wanted to make the point that when you’re playing for Canada, winning is the only goal and there is no second goal,” Keenan said. “Maybe that was not the best tactic to use, or the most effective, but it was something that certainly drove that point home.”
If it’s a bygone coaching style, it was often a winning one. And if both society and the sport have changed immeasurably in the years since his prime, Keenan’s influence endures. He says he can count about 60 former players who’ve gone on to be NHL general managers or coaches, among them Toronto’s newly inserted Craig Berube.
“If Toronto’s players want to make an impact on the city and on the franchise, they’re going to have to step up. And Craig’s going to have to set the bar high and demand they meet that expectation,” Keenan said.
For all that, Keenan acknowledged that a coach’s job “is more difficult today” than it was in his time.
“The players are of a different mindset now,” Keenan said. “They’re more coddled than they are pushed.”
Call him heartless, but Keenan sounds like a man who takes considerable pride in the fact nobody ever said the same about his teams.
This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said that Mike Keenan is in the Hockey Hall of Fame as a coach.