Maybe other NHL teams should follow Oilers and let players help pick new coach

As legend has it,  the Edmonton Oilers let their star players — Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Zach Hyman in particular — interview and select the team’s new head coach, Mike Babcock.

That’s not exactly what happened. Oilers GM Stan Bowman has said he and his team concluded during their post-season review of the club that the team needed a successful veteran coach, not a rookie, which led Bowman to contact Babcock, followed up by a meeting between himself, team president Jeff Jackson and Babcock. It was at that meeting that Babcock said he wanted to talk to the Oilers players’ leadership group.

Why did he take the job?

“Because they asked me,” Babcock explained this week. “When those kids asked me, they want to win, and I think they should. So I’m going to try to help.”

Given the results under Babcock so far, perhaps other teams should get their star players to play an integral role in the coach hiring process, even if Mark Messier doesn’t approve.

The results so far under Babcock have been good to great. He and the team have made a promising start in answering many of the questions around the team heading into the 2026-27 season.

Find goalies who can get the job done? Check.

Improve team’s defensive play? Check.

Get the best out of the team’s superstars as two-way players? Check.

Get better play out of team’s depth players? Hmm. That’s still a work in progress, and has been hindered by a significant run of injuries.

Improve the team’s penalty kill? Again, that’s a work in progress, also hampered by injuries to key penalty killers such as Matt Savoie, Jason Dickinson and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

Overall, though, the team looks renewed and changed compared to former coach Kris Knoblauch’s 2025-26 squad.

In no ten game segment from last season did the Oilers post a record as good as the 8-1-1 (eight wins, one regulation loss and one extra-time loss) of Babcock’s Oilers.

Babcock’s Oilers have an 0.850 points percentage so far. The best Knoblauch’s team did last year was a 0.700 points percentage from games 31 to 40.

When it comes to goals, shots, Grade A shots and 5-alarm shots, the Oilers have had a better Goals For % so far this year than in any ten game segment last year. The team has been outshot overall this year, but when it comes to the critical shots, Grade A shots and the subset of most dangerous five-alarm shots, Edmonton has a higher percentage of such shots this year than the Oilers did in most of their 10-game segments last year.

As for the play of individual Oilers at even strength, so far Connor McDavid is scoring like a maniac while also playing better two-way hockey than he did in 2025-26 or 2024-25, at least if we compare his rate of making major contributions to Grade A shots for to his rate of mistakes on Grade A shots against.

Other Oilers who have improved compared to last season in this same category this year include Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Vasily Podkolzin, Kasperi Kapanen, Evan Bouchard, and Ty Emberson.

Other players have dropped off a bit, which relates to one major area where the Oilers need improvement, their 5-on-5 play when neither McDavid nor Draisaitl have been on the ice.

So far, with McDavid and Draisaitl together on the ice at 5-on-5, Edmonton has scored 16 goals and given up just four, but without them the team has scored seven and given up 15 goals.

In this regard, a number of depth players have got to pick up their games, namely Owen Michaels, Zach Hyman, Trent Frederic, Ike Howard, Max Jones, Filip Hallander, Alex Formenton, Connor Murphy, Jake Walman and Shakir Mukhamadullin.