<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">When the Raptors called an urgent news conference yesterday, a lot of the signs were pointing to the impending firing of the club's coach, Sam Mitchell. The team, after all, looked unresponsive to Mitchell's passionate urgings in Wednesday night's loss to the Bulls, when the announced crowd of 14,198 looked half that size. They were coming off a disastrous 1-4 Western road trip. And Mitchell's long list of critics had just come to include Mike James, the starting guard who this week filled a satellite-radio time slot with criticism of Toronto's lack of a defensive game plan in Kobe Bryant's 81-point explosion. And that's not to say this corner thinks Mitchell should go. Still, this is a franchise run by a Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment CEO, Richard Peddie, who's not afraid to throw an underling or two overboard if the casualties will keep his unsinkable battleship of a career on course. And so the only other possible candidate for the plank, with the club listing and the crowds shrinking, was the general manager with whom Mitchell had frequently and recently feuded. And sure enough, Rob Babcock, the GM who admittedly wore earplugs to games to drown out the noise of the NBA circus, said he didn't hear the footsteps approaching yesterday when he was fired in an unexpected flash by the laughingstock franchise and replaced by 68-year-old Wayne Embry on an interim basis. Babcock, who'd served about 18 months of his four-year guaranteed contract, walked into a noon-hour meeting he'd previously arranged with Peddie to discuss other matters yesterday. He walked out unemployed. "I scheduled my own firing," laughed Babcock yesterday, when he showed up on cue to speak about his demise. And so ended the latest in a line of counter-productive power struggles between a Raptor GM and coach. Mitchell is still around today not because he's any good, which he may or may not be, but because he's a self-preservationist. Mitchell wisely adopted Embry as a mentor after Embry took a job as Babcock's overseer in the wake of Babcock's disastrous early months on the job. Mitchell's the guy you saw sitting next to his good friend and the club's minority owner, Larry Tanenbaum, at a Maple Leafs game not long ago. And it's no secret that Tanenbaum, the construction magnate with the naively optimistic outlook on all matters Raptor, serves well the jocks he befriends. (It was his private jet that ferried Vince Carter to that ridiculous photo opportunity of a graduation on the day on the most important game in franchise history.) In a political game with Mitchell, Babcock was overmatched. He got into this league through nepotism, not butt-kissing. Even yesterday, Peddie was recounting the qualities he saw in Babcock when he hired him in the drawn-out wake of Glen Grunwald's firing on April Fool's Day, 2004. The CEO pointed to the Babcock family's basketball "DNA." No matter that Babcock's big brother Pete, whose good name got Rob his first job, ran the Atlanta Hawks during a dismal slide into oblivion from which they have yet to recover. And it's not like Babcock didn't have his eye on taking out Mitchell. The pair's views often clashed, specifically on Babcock's insistence that Rafael Araujo, the disastrous draft pick, get high-profile playing time. Even last year there were rumblings that Mitchell would be removed and that Paul Silas, a friend of the Babcock brothers, would move in. But Rob Babcock, being closely observed by Embry and ultimately responsible to Peddie, made it pretty clear yesterday that his hands were tied in that regard. He said the contract extension that Mitchell still wants would have been, and remains, Peddie's call. </div> Source
