The fact that we are here at all is the first uncomfortable thing to sit with. That a franchise of the Edmonton Oilers’ stature, a team built around arguably the greatest player of his generation, in a city that treats hockey as a civic religion, found itself seriously, genuinely pursuing Mike Babcock as its next head coach says something unsettling about the state of things in that organization.
Not that Babcock is without credentials. He has 700 wins, a Stanley Cup, two Olympic golds, and the only Triple Gold Club membership in coaching history. The resume is heavy but so is everything else that comes attached to it.
And now, after a week that has seen the NHLPA step in, new and “more serious allegations” surface. The insiders who called the hire inevitable on Monday pivoting to contingency plans by Wednesday, the tide appears to finally be turning against it. Which brings us, at last, to where things actually stand.
Frank Seravalli, who has been closer to this story than most, was blunt on his Frankly Hockey show this week: “Things are starting to percolate in a way that the tide is gonna be very difficult in my view for Babcock to swim against.”
Vegas, the root of all problems
After firing Kris Knoblauch following a first-round exit to the Anaheim Ducks, Edmonton’s first call was to Bruce Cassidy who Vegas had quietly let go with eight games left in the season. Vegas said no. The NHL backed them up. Owner Daryl Katz, according to Elliotte Friedman, was “incredibly upset.” Then Peter Laviolette, the other credible veteran option, slipped away to Los Angeles. Options were shrinking fast and as Elliotte Friedman put it, “Everybody is super paranoid about what that could mean.”
So they turned to Babcock. And what’s striking, in retrospect, is just how all-in the organisation went and that it wasn’t a quiet enquiry. Babcock met in person with Katz. He met with GM Stan Bowman and president Jeff Jackson. And crucially, the core leadership group of Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman and others, who held direct in-person meetings, with Mark Spector reporting that the leadership group met with both Babcock and Laviolette around the same time before landing on Babcock as their preference. The stars, it seems, wanted the hard-nosed veteran voice.
Oilers Now host Bob Stauffer wasn’t hedging on Monday afternoon: “Mike Babcock is the Edmonton Oilers guy. From ownership, to management, to the players, he is the selection for the Edmonton Oilers hockey club.”
He went further still later that same day, calling the hire “inevitable.” TSN’s Ryan Rishaug reported that after Babcock’s meeting with the core group there was “full-throated support from that leadership group for the hire.” Friedman confirmed the meetings had occurred and that “whatever happened in those meeting(s) was enough to eliminate any potential objection.”
It looked done. And then Tuesday happened.
NHLPA looking into more serious allegations
The union’s intervention this week came out of the mess that was never properly resolved in 2023. When Babcock resigned from Columbus before the season even started, the NHL had been preparing to formally investigate his conduct. His resignation made that investigation, in the league’s view, moot. Everyone assumed he was done coaching and there was nothing left to look into.
Friedman explained the mechanics of it on the 32 Thoughts podcast: “I think everybody felt at that time Babcock was going to retire, and we weren’t going to see him in a head coaching role again. Well, now that this has come up, the Players’ Association has said, ‘Hold on a second. There was supposed to be an investigation that never happened because Babcock re-signed. Now we want it to happen. He shouldn’t be able to come back without that investigation.'”
TSN’s Darren Dreger confirmed the NHLPA had formally requested the NHL move forward with the investigation, with Pierre LeBrun adding that the league was waiting on Edmonton’s intentions before taking action. The message was that if the Oilers want to hire Babcock, the investigation happens first.
Then Seravalli added the detail that sort of changed a great deal of the discourse. Most people knew the phone photo narrative that Babcock had asked Columbus players to share personal images from their cellphones, that younger players found it deeply uncomfortable. Those photos weren’t apparently what ended things. “Sources indicate that asking players to see photos is NOT what ultimately resulted in Babcock’s resignation. It was the subsequent, currently unknown, allegation that cost Babcock his job. The NHLPA is in receipt of ‘significant’ additional claims from their own investigation involving players that were not publicly reported in 2023,” Seravalli said.
There is something else out there that the union knows about, significant enough that it will not allow a hiring to proceed without it being examined properly. Friedman’s conclusion on where the Oilers likely end up was unambiguous: “I just can’t see the Oilers moving forward with the hiring if they know this is coming. I think the Oilers know now that if they really are going to hire Babcock, they’re going to do it in the face of an investigation.”
The Babcock debacle was avoidable
Seravalli’s sharpest commentary this week was about the Oilers’ process. The whole situation, he argued, was avoidable: “This is why that unforced tactical error is really looming large today for the Oilers. This did not need to play out this way. It just didn’t. Take your time. Wait. Get all the ducks in a row. Get the answer from the NHL and NHLPA. See what happens with Bruce Cassidy. Put it all together in late June. But when you get impatient and you don’t want to be embarrassed by the Vegas Golden Knights running your show, this is the thing that you do that gets you into big, big trouble.”
Friedman weighed in on the ownership angle, placing the blame, if that’s the right word, squarely at the top: “I think it’s ownership-driven. I think this is right from the top. I think that a lot of what’s happened in Edmonton at the end of the season has been right from the top. The coaching change, the pursuit of Cassidy, and this.”
Stung by the Cassidy block, unable to get Laviolette, increasingly panicked about McDavid’s timeline, the Oilers made a move that has blown up publicly during the Stanley Cup Final with an investigation hanging over it and no clear path forward. By Wednesday, Seravalli had already moved to contingency planning suggesting Daryl Sutter as a potential pivot, the two-time Cup winner and Alberta native who told McDavid in the 2022 playoff handshake line to “go do it for Alberta.” Seemingly that’s how quickly the Babcock situation has deteriorated.
The part that actually matters most
Amid all the process stories and coaching carousel discourse, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s actually at stake beyond hockey decisions. The argument sometimes floated in favor of Babcock in Edmonton is that McDavid and Draisaitl are protected. That stars of that caliber don’t get treated the way lesser players do.
Former NHLer Mike Commodore, who played under Babcock in Detroit, rejected that framing entirely on Jason Gregor’s show: “Mike Babcock’s not an idiot. Connor and Leon are going to get treated like gold. It’s the third and fourth liners, the 5–7 defencemen, the rookies, the arena staff. It’s people like that who are going to be abused.”
And that’s precisely the point. It is indeed genuinely embarrassing that things got this far in what is arguably the most important offseason in franchise history, something we were having a conversation with TOR’s Sean Laycock about. That the leadership group signed off on it means little in this context, because of course McDavid and Draisaitl aren’t the ones who’d bear the cost. Think about the players who actually would. Trent Frederic, Isaac Howard, Curtis Lazar, the depth forwards and young players finding their footing in the league who have no leverage, no star power to hide behind and no protection from a coach with a well-documented history of targeting exactly those kinds of players.
Marner was a first-round pick and a future franchise star when Babcock reportedly put him in an impossible position as a rookie. Franzen was a genuine top-six contributor when Babcock allegedly made him terrified to step on the ice. The idea that a 22-year-old on an entry-level deal would somehow fare better is not a serious argument.
For what it’s worth, we don’t believe all the noise around this search tells the complete story. Moreover, we’d like to think that at some level, the Oilers organization recognizes what it would mean to put its players through something like what happened to Marner, to Franzen and to the players in Columbus whose experiences still haven’t been fully aired publicly. The NHLPA stepping in is exactly what the union is supposed to do. And if the tide is indeed turning against this hire, as the insiders closest to it now seem to believe, that would be the right outcome in our view.
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