SIMMONS SAYS: Oilers would face so many questions if they hire Babcock

The Oilers' window for success may have only two seasons left.

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Published Jun 14, 2026  •  Last updated 19 minutes ago  •  9 minute read

Head coach Mike Babcock delivers a message to his Detroit Red Wings players, including star defenceman Nicklas Lidstrom, during a Stanley Cup playoff game in 2010.   Photo by Christian Petersen /Getty Images

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Pavel Datsyuk played the best hockey of his life for Mike Babcock. By the end of his career, he wanted nothing to do with the coach of the Detroit Red Wings.

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Nick Lidstrom won four Norris Trophies while being coached by Babcock and walked away from the Wings because he couldn’t stand playing for the man anymore.

Chris Osgood had two brilliant playoff runs late in his goaltending career in Detroit. The coach was Babcock, who Osgood has next to nothing good to say about anymore.

This is the challenge for the NHL and for the Edmonton Oilers. Is there still a reason to want Babcock to coach? Can he still succeed? Or are his methods so much about yesterday that they may be irrelevant today?

Babcock is a hockey coach of historic quality — a man with a debatable Hall of Fame resume — and yet he is rightfully considered something of a deplorable human being. It’s entirely possible that both of those things are true — that he’s able to make teams better while exposing qualities of himself that are in no way endearing.

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If they can’t get Bruce Cassidy out of Vegas, the Oilers apparently want Babcock to coach. This is not unlike the controversial hiring of general manager Stan Bowman a few years back.

Many teams wouldn’t have wanted Bowman after the scandal with the Chicago Blackhawks. But the Oilers are not like many teams. Most teams today would not go near Babcock after the controversies that followed him upon leaving Detroit, leaving Toronto, and then leaving Columbus before he ever coached a single game for the Blue Jackets.

But the Oilers are racing the clock. Connor McDavid has two years left on his deal in Edmonton. Two years for the team to win a Stanley Cup with an all-time great at centre. Babcock came to Toronto as a giant hire and was brilliant and difficult in his early seasons here, taking a team of Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, William Nylander, Zach Hyman, all of them rookies, into a playoff series against a very strong Washington Capitals team. Who else has done anything similar in the NHL?

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Had Freddie Andersen played better in goal that spring, the Leafs would have won that round.

Like so many coaches, Babcock reached his best before date with the Leafs in his fifth season in Toronto in 2019. He hasn’t coached an NHL game since.

He doesn’t have to be anyone’s friend to succeed. He doesn’t have to be liked. He just has to lead, be singular the way he is singular, the way he was with Datsyuk or Lidstrom or Henrik Zetterberg, the way he did it with Team Canada at the Olympics in 2010 and 2014.

Winning is what coaches are paid for. If the NHL clears him to coach — and really, how can he not be cleared? — he might turn out to be exactly what the structurally challenged Oilers need.

Jordan Staal of the Carolina Hurricanes celebrates after scoring a goal during the first period in Game Five of the 2026 Stanley Cup Final at Lenovo Center on June 11, 2026 in Raleigh, N.C. Photo by Bruce Bennett /Getty Images

THIS AND THAT

For years, Ray Shero took some heat for drafting Jordan Staal one pick ahead of Jonathan Toews in the 2006 NHL Draft. Shero already had Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin in Pittsburgh and imagine how hockey history might have changed had he selected Toews with the second pick that year. So here we are, some 20 years later, and Toews is all but done, Shero has passed away, and Staal is smack in the middle of conversation for the Conn Smythe Trophy as Stanley Cup playoffs MVP with the Carolina Hurricanes. He has scored six goals in five games of the Final. He has scored in every game. The last player to do that was Jean Beliveau. When your name happens to be in the same sentence as Beliveau, no matter what the comparison, that’s something to cherish. This is Staal’s 20th season. He has averaged 18 goals a year. He never has been a big numbers guy, and that makes his playoff story all the more compelling … On one of the Team Canada lists I drew up before the Milan Olympics, I had Staal’s name on the roster. I was told by two Olympic decision-makers that he was too old to be considered … In his first season with the Hurricanes, Nik Ehlers has 17 playoff points with Carolina, six in the past two games. In the last seven seasons in Winnipeg, he had 14 playoff points, total … If an NHL player has a no-trade contract and asks to be traded — the way Dylan Larkin has asked the Red Wings to deal him — should that inquiry not void the spirit of the agreement and give the player no choice as to where he’s dealt. Either you want out or you don’t. You shouldn’t be able to protect yourself with a no-trade agreement and still be able to dictate where you’re traded to … By my unscientific calculations, Larkin would be the No. 1 centre on 20 NHL teams. The No. 2 centre on 10 teams … Darnell Nurse didn’t ask to be traded, per se, but instead told the Oilers he is willing to waive his no-trade arrangement to be dealt anywhere. That’s more up front than what Larkin has done with his general manager, Steve Yzerman … Every coach in the NHL should take video of Mark Stone’s stick-lifting and teach from it. Stone can change games with his stick lifting without ever getting called for hooking … Apparently, there is a five-year, $30-million contract awaiting pending free agent Darren Raddysh in Tampa in a non-tax state if he chooses to remain with the Lightning. But odds are, Raddysh will be paid in the neighbourhood of $64 million over eight years to play somewhere else … Those reporting that the Maple Leafs were within minutes or seconds of trading Matthew Knies at the deadline are not to be believed.

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The Toronto Blue Jays’ 2025 American League championship ring. The Champions Collective/Instagram

HEAR AND THERE

You buy rings for your team when it wins the World Series, not when it loses it … What do you show your friends — this is the year we almost won? … John Schneider has no choice but to be patient with Blue Jays first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr. “He wants to do what everyone wants him to,” said the Jays’ manager of his first baseman. That’s all very nice, but entering play Saturday, Guerrero Jr. ranked 112th in the American League in home runs, 42nd in OPS and 153rd in all of baseball in WAR. That isn’t good enough … Ichiro Suzuki hit as many as 15 home runs once in his Hall of Fame career. He hit 53 home runs in his final 10 big league seasons … How long can the Jays afford to keep Max Scherzer in the starting rotation? It’s one thing that the team is 1-5 in Scherzer’s starts. It’s another that Scherzer has a 10.23 earned run average. The cumulative score in Scherzer’s six starts is 44-21, not exactly in the Jays’ favour … Whatever it was the Blue Jays expected from Kazuma Okamoto, the first-year player from Japan is delivering more. Where would the Jays be without him and closer Louis Varland? … Rookie Trey Yesavage has a 3.78 earned run average. If he had any kind of defence behind him in his starts, his ERA would be just about 3 … What do awards mean? Members of the Tampa Bay Lighting won the Hart Trophy (Nikita Kucherov), the Vezina Trophy (Andrei Vasilevskiy) and the Adams Trophy (Jon Cooper) this season. What they didn’t win was a round in the playoffs … Times have certainly changed for Shayne Gostisbehere. Anybody could have had him for next to nothing a few years ago. The Flyers had to include a draft pick in their trade to get Arizona to take his contract in 2021. Now with his fourth team in five years, Gostisbehere has been huge for Carolina on this playoff run. His control from the point on the the power play is more than clinical … When John Chayka and Mats Sundin were hired to run the Leafs, I was assured by one insider that this would end all the leaks around the hockey club. “You won’t hear anything anymore, believe me,” I was told. Yet so far, just about everybody interviewed for every job opening has been reported by the same usual suspects.

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OG Anunoby of the New York Knicks celebrates with Karl-Anthony Towns after scoring the go-ahead basket against the San Antonio Spurs in the final seconds of Game 4 of the 2026 NBA Finals. Getty Images

SCENE AND HEARD

OG Anunoby is a quiet man. But when he played for the Raptors, he was also known internally for sending regular text messages to coaching staff and management complaining about how he was being utilized by the team. Known for his defensive play, he never thought he got the kind of offensive attention he deserved from his own team and after a while he was thought to be something of a whiner from the inside. Eventually he was traded for RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley … Mitch Marner is two months older than Anunoby. Anunoby, quite likely, will be the named NBA Finals MVP. Should Vegas come back and win the Stanley Cup, Marner will likely be the playoffs MVP in the NHL. The narrative with Marner leaving Toronto many never end: The narrative of OG leaving Toronto barely exists … And there was OG, Thursday night, with a New York and national basketball moment to remember forever. The Knicks moment of all Knicks moments. The winning tip in the crazy come-from-behind New York impossible win over the San Antonio Spurs. Anunoby had a superb fourth quarter in the incredible comeback win. An incredible win for New York. A choke of all universal proportions for the mostly young Spurs …Masai Ujiri truly thought he would win in Toronto with Anunoby, Pascal Siakam, Fred VanVleet and Scottie Barnes in the starting lineup. Now, Anunoby is on his way to a ring, Siakam played for one last year, and Barnes dominated Cleveland in the playoffs and you have to wonder — did Masai break up the Raptors too soon?

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Fans cheering for Canada arrive ahead of the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group B match between Canada and Bosnia and Herzegovina at Toronto Stadium in Toronto on June 12, 2026. Photo by Hyungcheol Park /Postmedia Network

AND ANOTHER THING

I have been fortunate to attend gold medal hockey games in Canada, World Series and NBA Finals games in Toronto, Grey Cups in Regina and Winnipeg and never seen anything like the atmosphere surrounding the Team Canada World Cup match on Friday afternoon. It was impossible not to feel a part of it all, whether you care about soccer or not. The parade to the game, with fans from both countries, was immense and spectacular before the match even began … Tough time to be the Canadian Open. The grandest golf tournament in the country is being played opposite the World Cup, the Stanley Cup Final, the NBA Finals, and a Blue Jays-Yankees series … I’ve watched three terrific CFL games in the early season. Wonder when will this shut up the people complaining about the supposed life-altering rule changes? … This would be fun and make for great television: It is possible that Team Canada and Team USA could meet in the Round of 32 at the World Cup … I’m a creature of habit: I want my Stanley Cup games on Saturday night and my NBA playoff games on Sunday … The learned voices of Hockey Night In Canada treat the high flip pass into the neutral zone like it’s something brand new. Funny, I can remember Pat Burns teaching it to Bob Rouse with the Leafs in the 1990s and Scotty Bowman doing the same with the Red Wings a few years later … So happy to see Russ Anber, the legendary Canadian boxing voice and longtime cornerman, being inducted this weekend in the International Boxing Hall of Fame … Sometimes dumb stuff just happens. The very same voter who had Matthew Schaefer as one of the consensus choices for rookie of the year in the NHL, which was obvious, somehow left him off his NHL all-rookie team ballot … Three-year-old filly Mighty Tanner won the fourth race at Woodbine Saturday. She’s named for former Canadian swimming great, Elaine Tanner, then nicknamed Mighty Mouse … Happy birthday to Macklin Celebrini (20), Steffi Graf (57), RJ Barrett (26), Ernie Whitt (74), Bobby Witt Jr. (26), Peter DeBoer (58), Jason Spezza (43), Andrew Cogliano (39), Jacques Rougeau (66), Darren Dreger (58) and Eric Desjardins (57) … And hey, whatever became of Bruce Wilson?

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