Why Jay Woodcroft was fired, and what’s next for the Oilers

The Edmonton Oilers fired head coach Jay Woodcroft and assistant coach Dave Manson on Sunday, as a preseason Stanley Cup favorite stumbled to a 3-9-1 start in its first 13 games.

The team has hired Kris Knoblauch — who leaves the New York Rangers‘ AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolf Pack, for his first NHL head-coaching job — and Hockey Hall of Famer Paul Coffey as an assistant coach.

Why did this happen? What comes next for the struggling Oilers? Here’s a look:

Why was Jay Woodcroft fired?

The fact that Woodcroft was fired wasn’t a surprise, given how bad the early results were for the Oilers. They’re second to last in the NHL with nine points in the standings, putting them eight points back from the final wild-card spot in the Western Conference.

Their offense, which ranked first in the NHL last season, is 26th in the league this season (2.69 goals per game). While star Leon Draisaitl has 15 points in 13 games, last season’s scoring champion and league MVP Connor McDavid has just 10 points in 11 games, including only two goals. He missed a few games due to injury before the Heritage Classic and hasn’t looked like himself on the ice or on the scoresheet.

Defensively, the Oilers have been a disaster, ranking 30th in goals against per game (3.92).

That’s mostly because of their goaltending, which ranks last in the NHL with a .864 team save percentage. But Woodcroft and his staff have also been called out for a change in their defensive system over the offseason from a man-to-man scheme to the kind of zone defense that has worked for teams like the Boston Bruins.

“I think it gets magnified by the fact that our record is what our record is right now,” Woodcroft said in October. “Any time you go do something new and you’re working through something, there’s growing pains.”

The pain became excruciating as the weeks went on, with players like Darnell Nurse and Evan Bouchard having struggled to adapt, rather mightily.

Should Jay Woodcroft have been fired?

The timing was a little surprising. The Oilers might have hit the nadir of their season in Thursday’s loss to the San Jose Sharks, the NHL’s worst team. They rebounded with a solid 4-1 win at the Seattle Kraken on Saturday, but apparently the wheels were already turning behind the scenes for Woodcroft’s demise.

(Maybe the amateur lip readers were right when they believed they spotted Woodcroft saying “that might be it” after the loss to the Sharks.)

How much of this was Woodcroft’s fault? From an analytics perspective, there was an argument that the Oilers should have stayed the course.

Entering Sunday, Edmonton is first in expected goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 (3.31) but 25th in goals per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 (2.15). That’s thanks to their 6.49% team shooting percentage at even strength.

There’s been no better example of that disconnect between how well the Oilers are performing analytically and not performing in actuality than with McDavid.

According to Stathletes, McDavid has been one of the NHL’s top players in passes that result in shots from teammates. But he’s averaging only one assist per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 this season through 11 games; last season, he averaged 20.

Defensively, there’s also a stark disconnect. The Oilers are seventh in the NHL in expected goals against per 60 minutes (2.42) but 23rd in goals against per 60 minutes. Again, much of that has been due to the play of Stuart Skinner and Jack Campbell, who have combined to give Edmonton the second worst 5-on-5 save percentage in the NHL (.889). While Woodcroft’s system was maligned, the Oilers should be better defensively than they are.

The Oilers had already made one move to shake up the roster, demoting Campbell through waivers to the AHL after he started the season 1-4-0. Typically, one might expect a trade to shake up the roster even more before the coach is fired — especially a coach that had gone 79-41-13 (.643 points percentage) in parts of three seasons behind the Edmonton bench.

But the expectations were too high, the wins were too low, and the people at the top of the organization clearly had someone else already in mind to coach this team instead of Jay Woodcroft.

Why was Kris Knoblauch hired?

“Hockey nepotism” is a phrase used around a lot of transactions in the NHL. While in some cases that can literally mean a person with familial ties to an organization getting a gig, more often it refers to the shared history of two individuals in the insular world of hockey.

It certainly applies to the hiring of Kris Knoblauch as Oilers head coach. That’s not a knock on Knoblauch, who has been viewed as a rising star in the coaching ranks for some time. But it’s an undeniable fact that he’s got history with two of the most important individuals in the Edmonton Oilers organization.

From 2012-17, Knoblauch was the head coach of the Erie Otters of the Ontario Hockey League. He was quite successful there both in on-ice achievement and in helping hone the skills of current NHL talents like Alex DeBrincat, Andre Burakovsky, Dylan Strome, Adam Pelech and current Oilers player Connor Brown.

But it’s another Connor that’s the important connection here. The first three seasons he was in Erie, Knoblauch coached McDavid, before the phenom made the leap to the NHL after being selected first overall in the 2015 draft by Edmonton.

“Connor McDavid was going to go play in the NHL no matter if Kris coached him or not, but he made Connor a better player,” McDavid’s agent Jeff Jackson told The Associated Press in 2017. “He teaches a culture of winning and speed and puck movement, but he empowers all the kids.”

Jeff Jackson has a new role these days: CEO of hockey operations for the Edmonton Oilers, hired in August to run the team.

Three months into Jackson’s tenure, Connor McDavid’s former junior hockey coach is now the head coach of the Oilers, a signing greenlit by McDavid’s former agent-turned-team CEO.

And that’s “hockey nepotism,” folks.

Again, that’s not to say Knoblauch, 45, couldn’t get an NHL head-coaching job on his own merits. He won championships in the WHL and OHL and has 12 years of head coaching experience. He also served two seasons as an assistant coach with the Philadelphia Flyers, giving him some NHL experience.

He returned the Wolf Pack to the playoffs last season for the first time in his four-season tenure, winning a round.

Knoblauch is a respected coach with a low-key demeanor. He’s known for his communication skills with players and for coaching effective special teams, which is one of the reasons the Flyers plucked him from the AHL in 2017.

He’s been ready for the challenge. They don’t come bigger than turning around an Oilers team that seemed primed for a Cup run but is one San Jose Sharks team from the bottom of the league standings.

What are the optics of this firing?

The optics are as bad as the Oilers’ current record.

GM Ken Holland is scheduled to be at the press conference introducing the new coaches with Jackson this afternoon. How much input did Holland have in this decision? Because from the outside, it looks like Connor McDavid picked the head coach and owner Daryl Katz picked the assistant coach.

This move creates two new narratives for a team that doesn’t really need any more of them at this point.

One is that McDavid is running the team. That shouldn’t be news, as this is his team in every sense — they hired his agent to run the franchise, for heaven’s sake. But this move should just intensify that scrutiny.

McDavid had already been accused of influencing personnel decisions when the team signed Brown, his former OHL linemate, last summer. Brown doesn’t have a point in nine games.

It’s now unavoidable that McDavid is going to be seen as an influence on Woodcroft going and Knoblauch coming in. Whether that’s fair or not, he’s tied to this hiring.

The placement of Coffey on the bench, with zero NHL coaching experience, conjures up a frustrating narrative that plagued the Oilers for years: The “old boys club” mismanagement of the team from big name players from their 1980s Stanley Cup dynasty, which is the team Katz rooted for as a fan. The days of Kevin Lowe running the team and Craig MacTavish as general manager, for example.

Earlier this year, Coffey revealed he had been hired in a somewhat secretive role by the Oilers. “I work directly with ownership. I work directly with Daryl,” he told The Athletic in January. “Wasn’t looking for a job but I’m happy to work. I absolutely love it. A little bit bigger, senior position [that I took] last year.”

As one NHL source put it: “It’s a tough spot for Kris for a few reasons. Coffey is a direct line to ownership and everyone knows it. And everyone knows this is a Connor pick that that also puts Knoblauch in a tough spot.”

Which probably isn’t going to quiet criticisms of this organization being a model of dysfunction.

Unless, of course, it works.

Can the Oilers turn this around?

Absolutely.

Shooting percentage is elastic. Bad goaltending can course correct or can be remedied somewhat through a trade. The Oilers are running about 10 percentage points behind their power-play conversion rate from last season. That could turn around too.

But the vibes were unmistakably bad. Pessimism had set in. You could feel the weight of preseason hype as an anchor around the Oilers whenever things went sour. McDavid said their losses were like “deaths by a thousand cuts,” and he’s right: While there were throughlines with the lack of goals and the poor goaltending, each defeat felt like a new malfunction.

Kris Knoblauch isn’t Bruce Boudreau or another coach whose charisma turns frowns upside down just by his presence in the dressing room. But he is, by all accounts, a good head coach that can change the conversation and potentially improve a few of the metrics that trended in the wrong direction, like special teams.

Like any coach, his success or failure will come down to pucks going in opponents’ nets and being kept out of the Oilers’ own. We’re a little more confident of the former turning around than the latter. That said, Skinner has shown the ability to get rolling and there’s still a chance the Oilers could go outside the organization for a fix — was that loss to the Sharks actually Mackenzie Blackwood‘s audition for the Oilers?

As of Sunday, Money Puck gives the Oilers a 69.2% chance of making the playoffs. (You can see their methodology here.) The St. Louis Blues‘ worst-to-first revival has been cited more than once to describe the Oilers’ plight, but that’s overstating that plight: The Blues were 10 points out of the wild card on Jan. 1, 2019. Edmonton is eight points out of a wild card, with a game in hand, on Nov. 12, with 69 games left in their season.

They don’t have to catch Vegas or Vancouver. They just have to get in it to have a chance to win it. That’s the goal, and it’s attainable.

As one NHL insider told me at a recent practice: There’s no other team outside the playoff picture right now that can get rolling like the Oilers have shown they can. They closed out last season winning 16 of 19 games, for example.

But their resurgence depends on McDavid getting rolling. And that the “deaths” are reduced to a dozen or so cuts a game. And that their underlying numbers remain strong and the actual numbers start to reflect them more, perhaps with a change in defensive tactics. And that the goaltending can play at a replacement level. And that the hiring of Knoblauch and Coffey has a net positive effect rather than appearing like a disastrous overreach in power by an owner and his franchise player.

That’s assuming a lot about the Oilers. Which, come to think of it, is why Woodcroft is now out of a job.