EDMONTON — All the wins. All the playoff series. The two Stanley Cup Finals.
What has it all got the Edmonton Oilers?
Squat, that’s what.
Their roster is "poorly constructed," the voice in Montreal tells us. They can’t bring home a title in the Connor McDavid era, laughs the "expert" in Calgary. Their GM can’t get the right goalie, scoffs the Pittsburgh scribe.
You play the most playoff games of any NHL team over the past five seasons, win the second most games in the West (behind Colorado) over the past seven seasons, and here’s your reward:
The "experts" in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver — those bastions of winning hockey — are telling you how to win.
No wonder the Oilers, led by rebel owner Daryl Katz, don’t give a rip what anyone thinks about them hiring Mike Babcock, who rides in from Saskatchewan with a grain elevator’s worth of bad ink for being a bully and, as Johan Franzen so famously described, "The worst person I’ve ever met."
"The truth is hard," said Babcock on Tuesday, an unrepentant man who volleyed back question after question about his very character. "No matter what happens when you coach, when you scratch people, when you sit them out, when they're at the end of their career and you don't play them, it's hard for them, for sure.
"You try to do that as respectfully as you can. Why? Because you think you're a good human being, that's the right thing. Sometimes it's not perceived that way."
Sometimes it’s not perceived that way…
In a city that has seen more NHL new coach press conferences than any other over the past 12 seasons — six head coaches for Connor McDavid, seven for Leon Draisaitl, 10 for Ryan Nugent-Hopkins — never before has one arrived with more personal baggage than Babcock.
Previous players have lined up to speak ill of the man. He was run out of his last gig before he could run a training camp. His win/loss record, as far down the list as that aspect of a Babcock hire falls, is pedestrian.
He won with a great Red Wings team, and took home gold with Team Canada. Big deal.
In his last nine NHL seasons as a head coach he won one playoff round. Toronto was a flop, plain and simple.
To his credit, there were no phony mea culpas issued on Tuesday. No song and dance like there had been in Columbus, where Babcock philosophized, "Change in all of us takes time. The first thing you have to do is embrace it and want to get better. I’ve been a lifelong learner, pursuing knowledge my whole life.
"What this (break from the NHL) has done is given me a chance to get outside my body, have a look and see what I’m doing, and understand that you need to change, you needed to grow."
He was in a cab for the airport two weeks later, after a misguided cell phone caper.
Today, he’s still that same straightforward, brutally honest coach, but one the Oilers hope has figured out the line between bravado and bullying. Between hard and harassment.
"You're allowed to grow as a human being. You're out to get better, and I think that's what this league's all about, is getting better," he said Tuesday. "I actually don't think my intentions are wrong that often. I think sometimes my tone is for sure. We have to work at that."
Katz's Oilers hired general manager Stan Bowman after his inadequate handling of a sexual abuse scandal in Chicago. They snapped up Corey Perry after he had his contract nullified by the Blackhawks. They embraced Evander Kane, until they didn’t anymore.
Nothing matters here anymore, except one thing. And that’s not the head coach.
Reputation? Good guy vibes?
If Babcock can bring a Stanley Cup to Edmonton, hiring him will be the right decision. Anything less, as we’ve learned, will be as wrong as everything else they’ve done here over the past decade.
The new coach is being billed as a guy who will engage the entire roster, not just the Big Boys here. A coach who will take the games of those superstars to a level of well-roundedness they’ve not reached.
“I don’t know if you've heard of this guy named Steve Yzerman,” Babcock began, in that southern Saskatoon drawl of his. “He played in the league for a long, long time. Scored tons and tons. Then a gentleman named Scotty Bowman came (to coach in Detroit).
“(Yzerman) didn't score quite as many points, but he won three Stanley Cups. You know, Stevie's a good friend of mine. He'll tell you in a second, he'd rather win the Cups.”
Connor McDavid won the Art Ross Trophy with 138 points last season. At five-on-five, he was plus-7.
McDavid, Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard, they’ve all shown the capabilities to play a level of defensive hockey that can win — almost. But their Yzerman Moment is coming, it seems, and by all accounts those players welcome its arrival.
“We're not asking him to score less. We're asking him to do things right,” Babcock said. “To make everyone else on the team important, not play different than their game, but in a different way and some details of the game.
“I've walked through this in detail with them. They say they're in.”
The end result, if reached, is exactly what this organization requires. Getting there, that’s going to be the hard part.
In Babcock, they’ve got the coach they think can get them over the top.
And the Edmonton Oilers couldn’t care less if you approve or not.
