Mike Babcock's Oilers Reboot Got Its Endorsement in Toronto, of All Places

Mike Babcock got his endorsement, and he got it in Toronto

Mike Babcock is the head coach of the Edmonton Oilers, and this week his new stars spent a Monday in Toronto telling reporters they are fine with it. Leon Draisaitl, Connor McDavid and Zach Hyman were among the Oilers who turned up at Hyman's annual charity golf tournament, and the questions were the ones everybody expected. Draisaitl acknowledged there is history, said the leadership group had an honest conversation with Babcock about the circumstances of his departure from Columbus three years ago, and said it is time to look forward.

That the endorsement happened in Toronto, roughly 20 minutes from the rink where Babcock's coaching reputation came apart, is the kind of detail that writes itself. It is also worth taking seriously, because the Oilers have just handed one of the league's two best rosters to a coach nobody expected to work in the NHL again — and the Maple Leafs are the team with the most direct experience of what that looks like.

How Edmonton got here

The Oilers hired Babcock in June, replacing Kris Knoblauch, after Edmonton lost in the first round of the 2026 playoffs. That is a stunning outcome for a team that had reached back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals, and it is the context for everything that followed. A first-round exit after two Finals appearances is the kind of result that convinces a front office the problem is not talent.

Babcock won a Stanley Cup in Detroit in 2008 and has more regular-season wins than almost anyone still living. He also has not coached an NHL game since he stepped down as Columbus's head coach in September 2023, days before training camp, amid an investigation into his interactions with players. Before that, he was fired by Toronto in November 2019, 23 games into a season the Leafs started 9-10-4.

McDavid, Draisaitl and Hyman met with him before the hire was finalized. That sequencing tells you Edmonton understood the risk and chose to manage it by getting buy-in first. It is a smarter process than the one most teams use.

What Draisaitl actually said

Draisaitl's comments were not a shrug. He said he was excited, that Babcock will be hard on the group, and that he wants a coach who demands more. He also did not pretend the history is not there — he said directly that it is, and that the players talked it through with the coach rather than around him.

That is the most interesting part. Edmonton's leadership group did not get handed a coach; they participated in the decision. Whether that is empowerment or a warning sign about who actually runs the Oilers depends entirely on how the season goes, and the answer will be obvious by December.

What it is not is a Toronto-style situation, where the coach arrives with institutional authority and spends four years accumulating friction until the room stops responding. Whatever else is true about Babcock in Edmonton, he is walking in without the benefit of the doubt, and he knows it.

Why Leafs fans should care

Two reasons, one petty and one that matters.

The petty one: Toronto spent four and a half seasons under Babcock and won a single playoff round in that span. The Leafs' relationship with him ended badly enough that it has become organizational shorthand for a certain kind of mistake — a big-name hire whose reputation outlived his usefulness. Watching a rival contender take that swing is going to be entertaining regardless of the result.

The one that matters: Edmonton is a legitimate Cup contender and a plausible June opponent, and the Oilers just made their most consequential change of the offseason behind the bench rather than on the roster. Toronto did the same thing. Craig Berube was fired on May 13 and Jim Hiller was hired in June as part of what John Chayka called an organizational shift, with Daniel Alfredsson brought in as associate coach alongside John Gruden and Brad Werenka.

Two contenders, two coaching resets, two theories about what was actually wrong. That is the most direct comparison available this season.

What Toronto learned the hard way

The Leafs hired Babcock in May 2015 on an eight-year contract that was, at the time, the richest coaching deal in NHL history. It was supposed to be the signal that Toronto was finally serious. What it produced was three consecutive first-round exits and a fourth season that ended with a firing in November.

The lesson Toronto took from it was not that Babcock is a bad coach. He is not. The lesson was that a coach's authority is a depreciating asset in a market this loud, and that hiring a résumé is not the same thing as hiring a fit. Chayka has said as much in his own language this summer, talking about an organizational shift rather than a personnel upgrade.

The Hiller contrast

The two hires could not be more different in kind. Babcock is a Cup winner with 1,000-plus games of head-coaching experience and a reputation for demanding environments. Hiller is 57, went 93-58-24 across three seasons in Los Angeles before being fired in March, and spent 2015-19 as an assistant in Toronto — meaning he has seen the Leafs' particular pressure from inside the building, at close range, during the Babcock years.

Edmonton bet on authority. Toronto bet on someone who understands the market and will not be swallowed by it. Both are defensible. Only one of them is a bet the Leafs have already made and lost once.

There is a real argument that Chayka's approach is the more sophisticated one. The problem with the 2025-26 Leafs was not that nobody was hard enough on them; it looked structural — a defence corps that struggled to exit its own zone and a power play that dried up when it mattered. Those read as systems problems, and Hiller plus Alfredsson is a systems answer. Edmonton, having watched its own systems fail in April, apparently disagreed about the diagnosis.

The take

Babcock will probably be fine in Edmonton, in the narrow sense that a roster with McDavid and Draisaitl wins a lot of hockey games regardless of who holds the whiteboard. The Oilers will be a playoff team. That was never the question.

The question is what happens in the third month of a bad stretch, when the demands land on players who have already been demanded of by three coaches in five years, and the leadership group that publicly signed off in July has to decide whether it still means it. Toronto knows how that story ends when the answer is no. So does Columbus.

Edmonton is betting the buy-in it collected in advance is durable. Given the alternative — another summer of asking whether McDavid is happy — that is a bet worth making. It is not a bet the Leafs should envy.

What's next

Camps open in September, and the Oilers will be one of the most closely watched teams in hockey from the first day. Toronto's own reset gets its first live test at the same time, with a bottom six rebuilt around Nick Paul, Colton Sissons, Teddy Blueger and Jack Roslovic, Sergei Bobrovsky in goal, and Gavin McKenna arriving as the No. 1 overall pick.

Edmonton and Toronto do not meet often, but both are trying to answer the same question with opposite methods. Track how it goes on our standings page, and keep an eye on the roster picture at players. We also looked at the broader Edmonton picture in our piece on why a McDavid-to-Toronto scenario is a 2028 story, not a 2026 one.

Mike Babcock is back. Toronto, of all places, is where he got the green light.