Give them credit, Edmonton Oilers apologists have been working overtime trying to make it look like last week’s coaching clusterpuck is perfectly normal.
Happens all the time, they say.
Except it doesn’t. Six coaches in 11 years for McDavid-Draisaitl is wildly abnormal for a contending team. The NHL’s elite teams have kept their coaches in place for eight, 10 and even 15 years.
Signing a coach to a three-year contract extension and then firing him before that extension begins is not normal either. It means the guys making the decisions aren’t sure about what they want to do.
And in the off-season, when there is time for an exhaustive search, taking applications for a new coach before telling the old coach he’s going to be fired is not the way teams do things. It’s terribly unprofessional.
People can love the Oilers all they want, but don’t try and spin this into something normal. The response to how the Oilers handled things was universally negative for very good reason.
Edmonton Oilers forwards Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid embrace at a ceremony marking 1,000 career points for Draisaitl at Rogers Place in Edmonton on Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026.
No need for hand holding
It’s a bad look on Edmonton’s leadership group that despite their experience and playoff mileage, management is still trying to find a coach who can coax their best out of the team. At this point, it shouldn’t matter who’s coaching the Oilers — they know how to play and they know what it takes. Either they choose to do it or they don’t.
Of Note: The 1994 New York Rangers won a Stanley Cup despite Mike Keenan’s chaotic reign because the players were leaders and winners. The Oilers should be at that stage of their careers, too, shouldn’t they?
Craig’s list
Granted, you rarely take responses on X seriously when they come from people who don’t have enough confidence in their opinions to use their real names, but Craig Berube doesn’t seem to be a popular coaching option among some Oilers fans.
He won a Stanley Cup in St. Louis, taking a last place team to a championship, and his Leafs gave Florida its toughest test of the playoffs two years ago (seven games), but that doesn’t seem to matter. Toronto finished so poorly last year that he must be a bad coach.
Of Note: The same people blaming Berube for the Leafs decline will also tell you that management didn’t give him any help and the Leafs core group doesn’t have what it takes to win in the playoffs and never will. So maybe Toronto’s problems weren’t on Berube.
Silent Knights
It was beautiful to see John Tortorella fined $100,000 and the Vegas Golden Knights lose a second round draft pick over the coach’s latest temper tantrum.
It was good too that Gary Bettman had the stones to stick with the sentence and not weaken it on appeal because it is a welcome penalty all across the league. Tortorella’s tough guy bluster doesn’t fool anyone — when the going gets tough, he runs and hides instead of answering questions from the media.
Of Note: It’s part of the coach’s job to make himself and his players available to the media. Rights holders pay millions for the product and the league counts on media exposure to grow the business. The NHL just made it clear that flipping everyone off because you’re in a bad mood comes with serious consequences.
The Cassidy case
I wonder, does this penalty make it more likely or less likely that the Golden Knights give Bruce Cassidy permission to speak with other clubs? Is refusing to let Cassidy interview for any jobs until the playoffs are over, or perhaps beyond, their way of fighting back at the NHL? Or does freeing him up smooth things over with the league and help with the appeal?
Of Note: It is absolutely their right, if not their responsibility, to prevent Cassidy from making a division rival better. As long as Vegas pays the last year of his $4.5-million contract, it’s their call to make.
How close are they?
So the Oilers lose to Anaheim, who loses to Vegas, who will probably lose to Colorado. Does that mean the Oilers are still close? A new coach, a simple attitude adjustment and a couple of new players gets them right back to the Stanley Cup’s doorstep?
Of Note: Anaheim scored 26 goals in six games to eliminate Edmonton. They were held to 13 goals in six games against Vegas.
The deal is done for one
Taylor Hall is a good guy having a great playoff, but let’s not re-write history here. You can still hear people referring to the Hall for Adam Larsson trade as some kind of historic robbery, In fact, it was never the lopsided trade everyone made it out to be.
After leaving Edmonton, Hall played for six different teams in 10 years and only posted more than 61 points once, the year he finished sixth in NHL scoring with 93 points and the writers awarded him the Hart (the NHLPA awarded Connor McDavid the Ted Lindsay Award). Last year in the playoffs with Carolina he had two goals and four assists in 15 games.
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E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com
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