Better luck next year: The Edmonton Oilers have reached the desperation stage

The Edmonton Oilers hired Mike Babcock. That is insane.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the Edmonton Oilers.

It should be a good rule of thumb that if the head coach you are thinking of hiring requires an investigation by both the NHL and the NHL Player’s Association just to see if he is allowed to coach, then it is probably not a good idea to be pursuing that person.

The Edmonton Oilers did not care about any of that.

They officially went through with it on Tuesday and hired Mike Babcock to be their next head coach. It is move that can only be described as a last desperate act to try and win a Stanley Cup with Connor McDavid before he eventually gets tired of the Edmonton circus and moves on.

And McDavid was reportedly one of the people pushing hardest for Babcock to get the job.

All of this seems like a bad idea. As does everything the Oilers have done recently.

The issues with the Babcock hiring are extensive, and begin with the way he has treated his players over the years.

• When he was with the Detroit Red Wings, he drove Johan Franzen to a mental breakdown on the bench and in the locker room, prompting Franzen to later call Babcock the worst person he has ever met. The treatment of Franzen was so bad that his former teammate, Chris Chelios, perhaps the poster child for hockey toughness and manliness, called it “the worst thing” he had ever seen in hockey. That dude played 26 years in the NHL at a time when there were seemingly no rules. Think about what he’s saying when he says THAT is maybe the worst thing he ever saw in the NHL.

• When he was with the Toronto Maple Leafs he made a then-rookie Mitch Marner rank the work ethic of his teammates, and then shared Marner’s ranking with said teammates in what can only be described as a purely fucked up mind game to play on a rookie. That was one of the things that eventually led to his dismissal from the Maple Leafs (aside from the playoff failures, which we will get to).

• Despite all of that, the Columbus Blue Jackets were still desperate enough for a splash head-coaching hire in 2023-24 and hired Babcock to try and turn their franchise around. He never even made it to training camp. During his initial meetings with players, word surfaced that Babcock was trying to pry into the personal lives of his players and look at pictures on their phones. Babcock eventually resigned given the allegations, with the Blue Jackets later calling the hire “a mistake.”

There is an even more extensive list of individual players across the league that have spoken out for their distrust and dislike of Babcock. Former NHL defenseman Mike Commodore was banging this drum long before any of this stuff become public. Former Maple Leafs defenseman Frank Corrado recently spoke out about the power dynamics Babcock likes to utilize within the organization, and while also saying he is nothing like another in-your-face style coach in John Tortorella. In Corrado’s words, Tortorella will say everything, good and bad, to your face and be the first to offer encouragement.

“Torts says it to your face, good or bad, and he’s the first guy to come down to the bench and pat you on the back when you do something good. He’s the first guy to give you reassurance when he thinks you deserve it or you need it. So as much as Torts can be prickly, Torts cares about the individual. Babs cares about Babs,” he said.

He added: “I wouldn’t hire him. I wouldn’t want anything to do with him.”

Babcock has not coached in the NHL since the Columbus incident.

Technically speaking, he has not actually coached a game since the 2019-20 season when he was fired by the Maple Leafs.

The toxicity of his hire is especially troubling when you consider the general manager making the decision, Stan Bowman, has his own disturbing background given his role in dealing with the Kyle Beach situation with the Chicago Blackhawks, one of the most disturbing scandals in league history.

(He also needed to be cleared by the NHL for the Oilers to hire him … there is a trend here.)

It’s just bad look for the organization.

It’s not about being a cutthroat team that hires tough people that want to win. It’s legitimately hiring bad people that had either abused their positions of power (Babcock), or not used their positions of power to protect a vulnerable player (Bowman).

All of that is bad enough.

But there’s another, even dumber layer to all of this: These people aren’t even good at the jobs their supposed to be doing.

Not that being good at the job would justify any of this, but it would at least make it easier to understand the thought process, as fucked up as that line of thinking is.

At the time of Bowman’s departure from Chicago he was actively ushering that franchise into the NHL’s basement through comically inept management. It was not the start of a rebuild. It was not only because of core players getting older. It was because he was a bumbling doofus that got everything wrong.

His brief tenure so far in Edmonton has been more of the same. He has gotten pretty much every major move wrong and only made their biggest weaknesses worse.

He allowed Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg to be poached away as restricted free agents.

He gave Trent Frederic a horrible seven-year contract that is aging like milk.

He tried to fix the goalie issue by taking on all of Tristan Jarry’s remaining contract, and giving up good assets to do it.

When neither McDavid or Draisaitl were on the ice during 5-on-5 play the Oilers were outscored by a 55-86 margin with only a 48.1 percent expected goals share. It was some of the worst depth they have had during the entirety of the McDavid-Draisaitl era.

The same problems that have always existed not only still exist, they are in some cases even worse.

And that now brings us to Babcock.

Not only does he carry immense baggage with him and bring terrible optics to the franchise, he also has not even been a successful coach in a decade-and-a-half.

Since the start of the 2010-11 season a Babcock-coached team has won just one playoff series.

He has not won a playoff series since the first round of the 2012-13 playoffs.

For some perspective on that: There have been 40 coaches in the NHL that have won at least one playoff series since Babcock last won one, including 17 coaches that have won at least one playoff series with MULTIPLE franchises. Two of those coaches, Lindy Ruff and Pete DeBoer, have won at least one playoff series with THREE different franchises.

This is the list.

But hey, sometimes playoff success can be flukey and noisy. Sometimes it can be about some luck, player health and injuries, just getting the right matchup or even the quality of the team. Surely there is at least some serious regular season success to be had here? Maybe a Presidents’ Trophy? Maybe the top spot in the conference? At least a division championship of some sort?

No.

None of that.

Since Babcock last won a playoff series his teams have never finished higher than third place in its own division.

The last time one of his teams finished higher than third place in its own division was the 2010-11 season. As a coach, that is nine straight years of third-place (at-best) finishes. In terms of real time, it is 15 years.

In the context of the rest of the league, here’s where his teams have finished in the league-wide standings since that 2010-11 season: 9th, 12th, 14th, 11th, 30th, 13th, 7th, 7th. He was fired in the ninth season where his team was 9-10-4 and near the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings and 21st overall in the league.

What is the appeal here?

Does he develop young players? Not really.

Is he the type of person you want as the face of your franchise? You probably shouldn’t.

Has he had anything that even resembles success lately? Absolutely not.

I am not really sure what we are doing here.

If the Oilers wanted a Stanley Cup winning coach that could push people be a hard-ass, there are actually several of them sitting there available right now.

Craig Berube fits that mold and is still sitting out there.

John Tortorella still wants to coach.

Would they be good hires? Not necessarily. But they would probably be better than whatever this is.

The Oilers reportedly wanted to talk to Bruce Cassidy (who also would have fit that mold) only to have the Vegas Golden Knights reject them. Nothing you can do about that, but you can at least try to find a better alternative than this.

This just screams of desperation. And based on recent history it’s probably not going to end well. The best hope here is that it just ends with some losing and not complete and total embarrassment for the franchise.

At least not anymore than it is already experiencing.

Now let’s talk more about the 2025-26 Oilers, what went right, what went wrong, and what happens next after a wildly disappointing first-round exit in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

What went right this season