Ahead of Saturday night’s first game against the Boston Bruins, someone asked Toronto Maple Leafs coach Sheldon Keefe a question about preparation. The Bruins have two all-star-calibre goalies. They hadn’t announced which one would start. Does that affect your thinking?

On 31 other teams, a straight question gets you a straight-ish answer. But not this one.

“The preparation is about finding ways to get through their team to the goalie. The goalie is an afterthought for us,” Keefe said.

I guess that’s the sort of thing Keefe imagines Dirty Harry-era Clint Eastwood saying if he coached a hockey team, but it doesn’t make him sound super-prepared. It makes him sound rather the opposite.

Are we meant to take his answer literally – that Keefe and his army of assistants are so busy that they don’t spare a moment’s consideration for the opposing goalie – or are we meant to assume that he is so prepared that he has achieved a Zen state in which the goalie dissipates into nothingness?

Either way, it didn’t work.

Having told everyone about it in a tone of dismissal, Keefe’s employees showed the quality of his preparation by failing to get through on anyone. On Saturday night, the Leafs couldn’t have got through a peewee, five-a-side soccer team. They didn’t score a goal until the third period, and it was long over by then. It ended 5-1.

When he coached the team, Mike Babcock used to talk the same general way – ‘Plans? You’re asking me about plans? Don’t trouble yourself, brother. We got plans’ – and get the same exact results. You’re only beginning to notice how much of Babcock’s approach Keefe has copied.

He has not mastered Babcock’s way around a folksy truism, but he’s got the same blank stare and the same humourlessness. If you only started paying attention in the past 10 years, the people who coach the Leafs make the job seem about as much fun as grave digging.

As with Babcock, Keefe answers every question with an implied sigh and, often, an actual one. As though the Leafs make him do this stupid job and all he gets for it is millions of dollars.

At least Babcock had won a few things. I’m not sure where Keefe’s professional world weariness comes from. He certainly hasn’t earned it.

Maybe the next move isn’t to come up with more complicated questions – the sort Keefe & Co. may deign to answer straight up. Maybe the questions should become more basic.

As in, do you know where the arena is? Have you packed all your equipment on the bus? Have you checked?