Oilers searching for coach with ‘Midas touch’ after firing Knoblauch

The Edmonton Oilers have relieved head coach Kris Knoblauch and assistant coach Mark Stuart of their duties.

Whoever is behind the bench next season will be Connor McDavid’s, Leon Draisaitl’s, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’s and Darnell Nurse’s sixth head coach in a dozen years.

Those players have been the cornerstones on the Edmonton Oilers roster over that time, and the 2026-27 campaign will mark the National Hockey League team’s 12th of the McDavid era.

And of course they are. McDavid is the best hockey player in the world – this year’s scoring champion is up for his fourth Hart Trophy as the NHL’s most-valuable player. Draisaitl is one of the best, too, and has previously claimed both scoring and MVP honours. Nurse is a snarly, shutdown defenceman who makes $9.25 million a season, and former No. 1 draft pick Nugent-Hopkins is a two-way threat.

The quartet bid goodbye Thursday to the coach who got them the closest – of the five who’ve guided them thus far – to NHL glory: Kris Knoblauch, who lasted two-and-a-half years in the role.

The Oilers announced Thursday morning that they had fired Knoblauch along with assistant Mark Stuart. He ends his tenure with a regular-season record of 135-77-21 and to a 31-22 mark over three playoff runs.

Knoblauch, who last summer signed a three-year contract extension worth $7.5 million that is due to begin next season, led the team to two Stanley Cup Finals in a row before they bowed out of this year’s playoffs in the first round.

The Oilers never really looked like they had enough gas in the tank to get past the young Anaheim Ducks, who beat them in six games.

Frustration expressed during season

But even before the post-season began and before injuries started to mount as the regular season was drawing to a close, there appeared to be some dismay among the Oilers’ elite players for how they were being handled by the coaching staff.

Well before he missed the final 14 games of the season with a lower-body injury – Feb. 4, to be exact, just before the NHL took a long break for the Winter Olympics – Draisaitl expressed his frustration with a stumbling Oilers squad that was giving up a lot of goals (34 over a seven-game stretch) and was struggling on the penalty-kill (an atrocious 52.4 per cent in that time) after a 4-3 loss to the Calgary Flames.

“This league is too hard to just lollygag through games and try to get winning streaks going,” Draisaitl said that night. “You need everybody. It starts with coaches. Everybody. You’re never going to win if you have (only) four or five guys going. It starts at the top.”

And although McDavid said that his compliments of the “impressive” Tampa Bay Lightning after a March 21 loss to them weren’t meant to be an indictment of his own team, the assessment that Jon Cooper’s squad was “extremely well-coached (and) extremely well-organized” while his Oilers were “somewhat rehearsed and organized, but not to their level” stuck out.

Quest for perfect coaching match

Whether those sentiments played a role in Knoblauch’s firing, Stan Bowman wasn’t saying on Thursday morning, but the Oilers’ general manager basically leaned on the adage, ‘It’s easier to fire the coach than fire the players,’ when asked about player accountability for the results.

“At the end of the day, it is the players who are jumping over the boards and making things happen or not,” Bowman told reporters. “When they’ve shown they can do it, but they don’t always do it, then the question is, ‘How can we get there?’ You could say then you just change up the players. I guess that could be one approach, but the other approach is (finding) a coach that can get the most out of those guys, and I think that’s what we’re looking for.”

But while it makes sense for Bowman to believe “there has to be a methodology that matches up with the core group of players that we have,” it begs the question of how often the Oilers need to keep showing head coaches the door in the quest for the perfect match.

Maybe that question is coming too late, as McDavid is 29 and has two years left on a contract extension he signed last fall, and Draisaitl is 30, never mind that Nurse is 31 and Nugent-Hopkins 33.

But if not Todd McLellan, Ken Hitchcock, Dave Tippett, Jay Woodcroft and now Knoblauch, then who? Bruce Cassidy, former head coach of the Vegas Golden Knights and Boston Bruins, is rumoured as an Oilers’ target, although the GM wouldn’t comment on that Thursday.

Because while Bowman and Oilers chief executive officer Jeff Jackson, McDavid’s former agent, have work to do in assembling a roster around McDavid and Draisaitl worthy of another shot at a Cup, they need a coach who can pull the best out of them with and without the puck.

“There is that fine line (in that) they do things that no one else can do, and there is an element of risk to that,” Bowman said, acknowledging that the Oilers stars have suffered defensive lapses but that “it goes across the lineup.”

“Calibrating that right is the Midas touch. How can you not take away from what they can do that no one else can do?”