The National Hockey League is no more prone to imitation than any other species of parrot, particularly when something that seems counterintuitive works out well. It is for that reason and that reason only that the news out of Edmonton this day is not as gobsmacking at it seems.
Wait, Edmonton? What the hell does Edmonton have to do with anything, and why should it pull one's attention from what may be the most weirdly compelling Stanley Cup Finals in decades? Well, grab some pine, meat, and belt up, because we have finally reached the throbbing nucleus of organizational WTF-ness. While the Final is in Vegas and being minded by noted former-and-future head coach John Tortorella, the Oilers are about to hire Mike Babcock, the Captain Philip Francis Queeg of coaches, who is noted in the distant past for guiding championship teams in Detroit and noted more recently for destroying his reputation through a series of bizarre psychological gambits against players that helped get him fired from one job and forced him to resign from another.
And because hockey management is an inward-facing phenomenon along the lines of the Habsburg dynasty, the Babcock hire ties directly into these Finals. In other words, you couldn't make this up, and if you could, you should check into a mushroom detox center.
So where to begin? In Columbus, naturally, because this is the NHL, where every city is like every other city, Winnipeg excepted. Columbus is where the latest round of coaching upheaval began back in January. The Blue Jackets, looking for a cosmetic spark to save a season that ultimately proved beyond resuscitating, fired coach Dean Evason and replaced him on an interim basis with 71-year-old Rick Bowness, who had been a head coach in seven previous places going back to the 1980s and been retired for nearly two years. Evason had replaced Pascal Vincent, who had replaced Brad Larsen, who had replaced, of course, John Tortorella, because the circle must be unbroken. We'll return to that to that momentarily.
The Bowness hire sparked new inspiration among other dissatisfied teams looking for their own goats to scape and locker rooms to electrify by hiring one generation up. The NHL was already notorious for slapping new treads on old tires and dumping them into coaches' offices, because coaching in the NHL is apparently not about new ideas or new faces but old messages delivered by slightly different voices.
Babcock had been hired in Columbus after a flaming end to his time in Toronto, lowlighted by a gambit in which he called rookie Mitch Marner, currently the shining star in these Finals under Tortorella, into his office and asked him about the work habits of his teammates. When Marner foolishly told his coach what he thought, Babcock immediately went and told the veterans of Marner's observations. This went over about how you might expect, and Babcock was eventually fired amidst accusations of fostering a toxic work environment. (The Leafs were also on a six-game losing streak at the time, which is how hockey people typically identify a toxic work environment.)
After a hiatus coaching college hockey in Saskatchewan, Babcock was brought back to the NHL by the Blue Jackets. That stint ended after another brilliant psychological ploy in which Babcock asked for players' mobile phones to go through the photos; to be fair, Babcock also requested the phone of general manager Jarmo Kekäläinen, currently the general manager of the Buffalo Sabres, because the old faces/new gigs philosophy applies to the front office, too. Several of the younger players blanched at this breach of privacy, and Babcock resigned under pressure from the team and the players' union before he had even coached his first exhibition game.
So Babcock is an odd choice in Edmonton, you say? A team trying to keep its championship window open in the time remaining on Connor McDavid's contract going with an accomplished yet dodgy old warhorse? Ha! Have you learned nothing, you ignorant whelps?
Babcock meets all the qualifications for coaching in the NHL, namely that he used to be a coach somewhere else a long time ago. Assuming he doesn't ask for tax records or car keys from his new players, he will be the seventh coaching hire of the 2026 calendar year, with the other six being Bowness, interim coach D.J. Smith (formerly of Ottawa) in Los Angeles, Pete DeBoer in New York (five jobs), Tortorella (six), Peter Laviolette (seven jobs) as Smith's replacement with the Kings, and one newbie, Manny Malhotra in Vancouver.
If we go back just to 2025, there have been 20 coaching hires in the NHL, sixteen of which were coaches with prior NHL experience; half of those have had three or more jobs. Three of the current 31 coaches (Toronto is still vacant) coached previously for the same team they are coaching now, so you can see how thorough these coaching searches can be. Of the four hired for the first time, one (Adam Foote) has already been fired and been replaced by Malhotra. This fixation on newbies might explain why Vancouver is in such dire competitive straits, but before they hired Foote, they had three-timer Rick Tocchet quit them to go back to his career home in Philadelphia, and Tocchet replaced Bruce Boudreau, who'd coached in three previous places himself, so their recycling instincts are still there. Plus, Malhotra's son is expected to go very high in this year's draft and Vancouver is picking third. It takes a village, apparently. A very small village.
Indeed, Tortorella is the most recent shining example of how this works, as he had been fired a year earlier in Philadelphia but replaced Bruce Cassidy (three jobs) with eight games left in the Knights' regular season just as the team began its late season and playoff burst. It may be that Tortorella is the reason for that burst. Who the hell knows? It is sufficient to note that Vegas is 21-5-1 under him, and two games away from a Stanley Cup they looked light years from achieving on April Fool's Day. Hiring guys with long resumes predates Tortorella's arrival on The Strip, to be sure, and his success marks a rare time when it really worked.
And as for Cassidy (whoa, Cassidy?), he is part of the Babcock saga as well. When Cassidy was fired, he still had time left on his contract with Vegas, and when the Oilers and Kings asked Knights management to talk to him about their coaching vacancies, the Knights refused both times. Their stance, defended by the league office, is based on a correct yet still bizarre view of contract law that says, "We don't want you but this piece of paper you signed that says we do want you allows us to keep you from talking to people who actually do want you."
The Kings got tired of waiting for the Knights to get bored and opted for Laviolette's weighty resume. The Oilers got tired of waiting and, more improbably, went for Babcock, proving 1) that nobody is ever fully unhireable in this sport, no matter how many times other people found them fireable and 2) in the world of NHL management, the ideal shopping experience is always the remainder bin. It also illustrates that, for veteran coaches, past bad behaviors are typically regarded as just one of those zany quirks of geniuses who can handle line changes on the fly. But everyone already knew that.
And Babcock? Well, even the Canadian hockey media intelligentsia, which is well used to the league's recycling fetish, is stunned by this one, even as it reports that the the Oilers' veteran players, which include McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, the team's principal gateways to the Cup they cannot seem to win, are all good with Babcock as their new boss. And now we'll just have to wait to see if he asks for their dental records or PIN numbers at the introductory presser.
Correction (12:15 p.m. ET): Dean Evason was the coach replaced by Rick Bowness in Columbus, not Pascal Vincent.
