EDMONTON — There is so much blame to be shared around various Edmonton Oilers employees today, so many places to point a finger and say, “If this had been better, Jay Woodcroft wouldn’t be getting fired today.”
It starts, like everything does in a National Hockey League organization, at the top.
Owner Daryl Katz sits atop this coach-firing carousel. It’s been spinning since the day he took control.
Newly minted president Jeff Jackson is next in charge — make no mistake, he has far more ownership of this Woodcroft dismissal than the next guy in line, Ken Holland. And Holland trusted his son, head scout and assistant GM Brad Holland, on Jack Campbell, another big reason why we are here today.
Somewhere nearer the top sits Paul Coffey, as Katz’s window into all of this chaos.
History, however, tells us that firing the GM, the head scout, the president — or changing ownership — mid-season is the source of nothing but instability. Those are summertime moves, not November moves.
If you want your team to get better now — as in, Monday night against the New York Islanders — it is the coach and his staff whose removal can have an immediate and positive effect.
It might not all be his fault, as the great Pat Quinn was wont to say. But it damned sure was Jay Woodcroft’s problem, and today Woody and assistant coach Dave Manson are yesterday’s news.
“We kept hoping we were going to win games. really,” Holland said in the ol’ hastily called press conference Sunday, a specialty here in Edmonton. “After we lost the game against San Jose on Thursday night, Jeff and I started to talk really seriously about, should we consider making a coaching change.”
Did Holland owe it to Woodcroft to at least make a trade for a goalie? Well, two things are at play here:
One, this was president Jeff Jackson’s move. Kris Knoblauch is Jackson’s guy.
And two, Holland has been exploring the goalie market for a week now, and he can’t find the deal that we would look at and say, “OK, Woody, you’ve got your goalie.”
That trade simply isn’t there on Nov. 12, and giving Woodcroft a second-tier backup — then crossing your arms and telling him you’ve done your part to help — is as unfair as just firing him and Manson without making a trade at all.
Then there’s the part about an organization that fires coaches faster than most people go through vehicles.
“I can’t control what’s happened in the past with coaching changes, different managers over the years,” pleaded Jackson on Sunday. “We have a team that we believe should compete for the Stanley Cup. I’m a long-term strategy person, but I’m also here to try and win this year.”
So Woodcroft gets the can tied to him after a 3-9-1 start in a year so famously dubbed a “Cup or bust” season by Leon Draisaitl.
Is that fair?
Of course it’s not fair.
But nobody ever said that life in the NHL was going to be fair — for anyone. Not for Woodcroft, not for Katz, not for the lowly sports writer, much maligned these past few days for simply reporting on this whole mess in Edmonton.
The coach who says, “I don’t read Spec,” knows exactly what Spec is writing every day, and the GM who says he covets stability also has a boss or two who might have a different take on what stability really means.
Does that sound fair?
“We’re in win-now mode,” reasoned Holland.
In the end, the lessons learned by Woodcroft — who will be behind an NHL bench on Day 1 of the 2024-25 season, we’ll predict — are many. It starts with holding the top half of your roster as accountable as you do the bottom half, swings into a chapter or two on matching the players you have with the system you’d like to play, and then goes to a place that so many coaches get caught up in.
An NHL coach has many things to concern himself over, information he can’t let out. He has to tell a fib or two when it comes to injuries, etc. We get that.
The fact, however, that Woodcroft would not reveal his starting goalie for the next day’s pre-season game, belies a coach who tried too hard to control too much. That he remained so staunch in his love for an 11-and-7 lineup deployment — despite the fact that about 40 per cent of any given lineup detests that deployment — was another area of control that may deserve a solid debrief.
We can only evaluate Woodcroft from our spot as a member of the daily media. I’m not in the meetings and I don’t have access to his relationships with individual players.
But sometimes when you sweat the small stuff the way Woodcroft did, the big things don’t get the attention they deserve.
Like a group of depth players who feel like they are overlooked. Group buy-in is everything in this sport, and accountability issues — along with leaning on McDavid and Draisaitl too much — hurt this coach’s relationship with a certain percentage of his team.
He’s not the first one to make those mistakes, but he is the most recent one.
And today, there’s a new guy in town.
We can only hope that Kris Knoblauch has been taking notes.
