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Stauffer: Oilers hiring Mike Babcock as coach ‘inevitable’
Edmonton Oilers Stan Bowman Jeff Jackson
baggedmilk
Jun 8, 2026, 21:00 EDTUpdated: Jun 8, 2026, 21:25 EDT
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If you were holding out hope that the Oilers would find a way to get Bruce Cassidy locked in as the team’s next coach, that dream came crashing down to earth after reports started coming out that Edmonton was in talks with Mike Babcock. And during Monday’s episode of Oilers Now, Bob Stauffer reported, “Assuming there are no complications carrying forward with the NHL, Mike Babcock will be the next coach of the Edmonton Oilers. It’s inevitable.” This should go over well, huh?
Stauffer didn’t pull punches to start his show on Monday:
“What happens sometime is we sit, and we go, ‘Well, let’s just wait and see what transpires over the next little while.’ But we’re not going to do that today. I’m not going to BS you. I’m going to tell you exactly the way it is, okay? 100% Mike Babcock is the Edmonton Oilers’ guy. There were several different parties involved with this. At various times, Mike Babcock has not only spoken to Edmonton Oilers’ owner, Daryl Katz, but he has met with the Oilers’ key players. He has met with Harrison Katz. He’s obviously met with Oilers’ President, Jeff Jackson, and Oilers’ General Manager, Stan Bowman.”
So… we got our guy, I guess? Mike Babcock? Really? As you can imagine, having this story or even idea floating around the Oilersphere landed about as well with the fanbase as a diarrhea dance floor, mostly we’ve spent the last few weeks wondering where this coaching search would end up and whether Vegas would let us talk to Bruce Cassidy. Yet, just when you thought the story was weird enough, the team arrives at one of the most polarizing options available.
“The Edmonton Oilers are in a win-now mode, and they don’t just want to win for one more year. They want to win in perpetuity here over the next several years. And they need to have a coach who has shown the ability to win, and the ability to put structure and process in a team’s game, and the ability to have the top players deal with the fact that the best want to be led. Conor McDavid, Leon Dreisaitel, they want to win.”
I mean, we knew the team was looking for a guy with experience, but really? Mike Babcock?
And listen, I’m not here pretending for one second that Mike Babcock doesn’t have a Cup win on his resume. He absolutely does, and no one can take that away from him. He won a Stanley Cup with a stacked Red Wings team nearly 20 years ago, won Olympic Gold, and has enough experience on his HockeyDB page where nobody is going to argue he’s some random name pulled out of a hat. The problem is how things have been going since 2008 when he won that Cup.
Babcock hasn’t coached in the NHL since being fired by the Toronto Maple Leafs back in 2019. That was when we heard about him making Marner put together a list of his hardest working teammates, only to reveal the list to the group later on. He then had a chance to return with the Columbus Blue Jackets, only to resign before the season even started because he was looking through players’ phones. If that total bag of weirdness from him wasn’t enough, there’s also the fact that he hasn’t won a playoff series since 2013. He hasn’t done squat apart from shoot himself in the foot in well over a decade. So, can understand why the reaction from Oilers fans has been landing somewhere between confusion, frustration, and full-on rage.
I mean, we have two years left on Connor McDavid’s contract and this is the best idea they’ve got?
We all know that the Oilers wanted Bruce Cassidy, and that made plenty of sense. Cassidy had recent success in Boston and Vegas, a Stanley Cup ring from after Bitcoin was invented, and the kind credibility that was an easy sell in a market that is desperate for their team to finally finish the job. The issue, of course, is that Vegas isn’t letting Bruce come out to play, which leaves the Oilers in a spot to find a Plan B. But never in my life did I think they would be so trigger happy to get something done than to dust off Mike Babcock. They didn’t want to even wait until the Cup Final was over?
For a team with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl still driving the bus, every major decision has to be about maximizing the window that is open right now. That’s why this hire feels so jarring. It’s not just that Babcock comes with plenty of baggage from his last two stops. It’s that the Oilers would be bringing in a coach who has not been behind an NHL bench in seven years, whose last attempted return ended before it began, and whose recent playoff success has been non-existent. Yes, we have Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, but this ain’t the 2008 Red Wings that was littered with Hall of Famers.
All I know for sure is that this bet on Babcock is one of the biggest ones that I can remember in the most important offseason that I can remember. And it’s an even bigger gamble in a market that will be questioning this move incessantly before he’s even held a press conference. Even with the apparent co-signing from the Oilers’ leadership group, this team doesn’t need another sideshow. They don’t need the coach’s sketchy past to be the story. They need the cleanest possible path to winning more hockey teams, a coach who can tighten the details without being a distraction, and a plan that does more than keep this team competitive for one more year.
Clearly the organization believes Babcock is the guy to get this team to the next level. But if the Mike Babcock era really is “inevitable,” then the Oilers just made a decision that is going to test the fanbase before the ink is even dry, and turn them into a league-wide punchline for all 31 other fanbases in the court of public opinion. I’m not sure that’s the route many of us would have taken at this stage of the McDavid era. But, as Stauffer so beautifully put it, “He’s their choice. You can think whatever you want.” I guess all they care about is that we keep paying the ever rising cost of tickets. Buckle up.

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