On Sunday (Nov. 12) the Edmonton Oilers relieved head coach Jay Woodcroft and assistant coach Dave Manson of their duties, replacing them with Kris Knoblauch and Paul Coffey, respectively. The moves were made with Edmonton sitting 31st overall in the NHL standings after starting the 2023-24 season 3-9-1.
It was the 10th time that the Oilers have changed their head coach since owner Darryl Katz purchased the team in 2008, the most changes behind the bench among all NHL teams in that span.
Previously, a total of just eight different individuals served as head coach of the Oilers over Edmonton’s first three decades in the NHL. Their last nine head coaches have lasted an average of 121.1 regular season games with the team, which doesn’t even equate to a year and a half’s worth of an 82-game schedule.
Since 2009, the longest tenure for an Oilers head coach is 266 regular season games, served by Todd McLellan. Edmonton’s other eight head coaches over that stretch have spent an average of 103 games behind the bench.
Knoblauch will be the fifth head coach in the NHL career of Connor McDavid, who isn’t even 27 years old yet. At the same age, Wayne Gretzky had played for essentially one head coach with the Oilers, Glen Sather (Bryan Watson briefly served as Edmonton’s head coach when Gretzky was 19), and was on his way to winning a fourth Stanley Cup.
This astonishing lack of stability might go a long way in explaining why the Oilers finished with one of the NHL’s three-worst records in every full-length season from 2009-10 to 2015-16, and since continue to come up far short of their Stanley Cup expectations despite a lineup that includes the greatest player on the planet, McDavid, and a sidekick who is one of the five best skaters in the game, Leon Draisaitl.
Woodcroft’s Winning Ways
On Feb. 10, 2022, Woodcroft was named Oilers head coach, replacing Dave Tippett, who had been fired after two and a half seasons behind Edmonton’s bench.
It was the first NHL head coaching position for Woodcroft, who had been in his fourth season as head coach of the Bakersfield Condors, the Oilers’ American Hockey League (AHL) affiliate. He took over an Oilers team that had won just seven times in its previous 23 games and sat outside of the playoff picture with 38 games left on its schedule.
With Woodcroft at the helm, Edmonton went 26-9-3 the rest of the season, tying for the most points in the league over that span.
In the playoffs, Edmonton defeated the Los Angeles Kings 4-3 in the first round to win its first playoff series in five years. Then in Round 2, the Oilers beat the Calgary Flames 4-1 to advance to the Western Conference Final for the first time since 2006.
Edmonton was swept in the conference final by the Colorado Avalanche, who would go on to capture the Stanley Cup. But the year was considered an unequivocal success for the Oilers, thanks to their results under Woodcroft.
In his first full season behind the bench, 2022-23, Woodcroft guided the Oilers to their first 50-win campaign since 1986-87. Edmonton finished the season with 109 points, the team’s most in 37 years.
The 2023 postseason opened with Edmonton once again defeating Los Angeles in the first round, this time in six games, but the Oilers were knocked off 4-2 in Round 2 by the Vegas Golden Knights.
Some saw the second-round elimination as a failure, but the Oilers were facing a superior opponent. Vegas had the better regular season record, home ice advantage for the series, and ultimately went on to win the Stanley Cup.
Oilers Stumble to Start Season
Last Thursday (Nov. 9), Edmonton fell 3-2 to the last-place San Jose Sharks, a team that started the month allowing 10 goals in back-to-back games. The loss, Edmonton’s eighth in its last nine games, dropped the Oilers to 2-9-1.
A myriad of issues plagued Edmonton over its first dozen games. The team’s defence committed so many egregious errors that it might not have mattered if the Oilers had Dominik Hasek in his prime between the pipes. As it was, Oilers’ goaltenders Jack Campbell and Stuart Skinner weren’t exactly in prime form themselves, which only exacerbated matters.
Meanwhile, Draisaitl and McDavid each had their biggest individual slump in years, and they happened simultaneously. Over a span of 10 games from Oct. 17 to Nov. 11, the Dynamic Duo combined to score one goal. This from a pair that had 116 goals between them in 2022-23.
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It became apparent that Edmonton has holes in its lineup, but the Oilers are so squeezed against the salary cap that they’re unable to make any moves to address deficiencies, which only become more glaring with the inevitable injuries that occur over the course of a season. A coach can only work with the roster he’s given, and this is the squad that Oilers general manager and president of hockey operations Ken Holland handed Woodcroft.
Axe Falls on Woodcroft
The Oilers defeated the Seattle Kraken 4-1 at Climate Pledge Arena on Saturday (Nov. 11), in what would prove to be Woodcroft’s last game as head coach. There were still 69 games left on Edmonton’s 2023-24 schedule, but Woodcroft would not be given the chance to get the ship back on course. A month’s worth of choppy waters was enough for Holland and CEO of hockey operations Jeff Jackson to decide that the coach with the then-best points percentage (.643) in franchise history was no longer fit to lead this team.
“We’re in a business where you’ve got to win games, and as we got out of the gate early on, you figure you’re going to turn it around,” Holland said at a press conference Sunday following the coaching change.
“You’re into Game 3, Game 4, Game 5, and as our record continued to get worse, Jeff and I were talking on more than an everyday basis – probably two or three times a day over the last week – trying to figure out solutions. I’ve been on the phone here trying to talk to other teams to see what’s out there, but in terms of trades, when you’re 12 games into a season, you’ve got to have a trading partner. So I kept hoping were going to win a game and really, after we lost the game against San Jose on Thursday night, Jeff and I started to talk really seriously about whether we should consider making a coaching change. Obviously, we made the decision to make that decision.”
Holland later acknowledged the difficulty in that decision, considering Woodcroft’s record over the prior year and a half:
“Certainly, we’ve played at a high level under (Woodcroft). I think we had the second-best winning percentage over the last 120 games under Jay, but we’re in win-now mode and I think we’ve talked about that over the last few years that I’ve been here. I think since I’ve got here, when you look at our team – the players on the team, the age of the team – the time is now to try to win.
“I guess we could get into the debate: is 12 games or 13 games enough? I think if you wait another 10 games and things don’t change, it’s probably too late, so Jeff and I felt that it was something that needed to be done.”
The urgency is understandable. Draisaitl, after all, has only one season after this left on his contract, and McDavid’s deal is up following the 2025-26 season. But is the coaching change the right move to make? Woodcroft very well could have coached the team out of its funk. And is he even responsible for said funk? It’s debatable if any other given coach, be it Knoblauch or a Hall-of-Famer like Sather, might have been able to wrangle more wins out of this unit over the last month.
Knoblauch Takes Over
Knoblauch comes to the Oilers following four-plus seasons as head coach of the Hartford Wolf Pack of the AHL, while Coffey has been with the Oilers serving as special advisor to ownership and hockey operations since last year. The Oilers won the coaching duo’s first game, 4-1 over the New York Islanders at Rogers Place on Monday (Nov. 13).
The 45-year-old Knoblauch has had success behind the bench both with the Wolf Pack and the Erie Otters of the Ontario Hockey League (OHL), where Knoblauch coached McDavid for three seasons before the Oilers drafted him first overall in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft.
Knoblauch might be the perfect coach for the Oilers. He might push them to heights not yet seen during the Draisaitl/McDavid era. But what’s to say they won’t hit a rough patch or two along the way? Almost every team – even those that end the postseason skating laps with Lord Stanley – does. And then what? Do the Oilers fire Knoblauch and bring in yet another new voice?
Perhaps Katz should look elsewhere within his glass house for answers as to why his hockey team hasn’t delivered him a ring. If you’ve tried 10 different bulbs in the light socket and your living room is still in darkness, that might indicate the bulb isn’t the problem.
Sustained success does not come without stability. At some point, the revolving door behind the bench must stop churning coaches if these Oilers are going to achieve their goal of winning a Stanley Cup.
