Oilers part ways with Paul Coffey

With the official announcement of Dave Tippett being hired as the head coach of the Edmonton Oilers now in the past, we’ll soon be finding out the future of other current members of the team’s coaching staff. According to Mark Spector, the team will be parting ways with skills and development coach Paul Coffey.

In January of 2018 with the team in flux and on the verge of missing the playoffs, the Oilers hired the former franchise legend and current Hall of Famer to come in and do some skills work with the team. Part of his gig, apparently, was to help Edmonton’s woefully bad special teams.

It made some sense, on the surface, because Coffey was a very skilled player. Still, it was a hiring that rubbed the fanbase the wrong way because it had the Old Boys Club reek to it. Nobody paid much attention to Coffey in his role until our pal Dusty Nielson dropped this bomb about his salary and what it suggested about the Oilers’ priorities…

So… that’s that. The Paul Coffey 2.0 era in Edmonton is now over. Given the chunk of change Darryl Katz was paying him, I’m not overly surprised. They can probably use that saved money to hire some kind of Family Liason or maybe an entire analytics staff, which is something Tippett would probably like. 

We’ll find out in the next few weeks what’ll happen with the rest of the coaching staff.