Sadly, the head coach of Edomonton is sacked due to the mis…
Once Jay Woodcroft’s two-year tenure as an Edmonton Oilers head coach came to an end, the team did what it always does when it finds itself shorthanded on players and goes into neutral: it fired the man in the dugout.
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By mid-November, the 31st-place Oilers looked certain to blow their season, so management provided yet another justification for this group, sacking defense coaches Dave Manson and Woodcroft and adding junior coach Kris Knoblauch, a former Oiler, and Connor McDavid.
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Once more, the coach is held responsible for the team’s lack of success.
At the hurriedly scheduled news conference on Sunday, general manager Ken Holland stated, “That’s why I said it’s a difficult decision.” “With Jay, we had the second-best winning percentage over the previous 120 games, but we’re focused on winning right now. Now is the moment to give it your all.
“You may debate whether 12 or 13 games is enough, but I believe it’s definitely too late if you wait another 10 games and nothing changes. Thus, Jeff Jackson, the CEO of hockey operations, and I believed that action was necessary.
With this, there have been 11 different head coaches in the previous 16 seasons. The current leadership group, which consists of Todd McLellan (266 games), Ken Hitchcock (62 games), Dave Tippett (161 games), and Woodcroft (133 games), has had five coaches in eight years and thirteen games.
I’m hard-pressed to come up with a more scathing condemnation of a dressing room and an organization.
It also raises the question of how one does not examine the core of this hockey team in great detail. Given their skill, background, and everything they have on the line this season, it is a problem that needs to be addressed if it takes another coaching change to inspire them.
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Holland declared, “I believe in the core.” Over the past two years, no one has participated in more than five playoff rounds. We made it to the final four and eight times, and we finished in the top five or six spots in the league in terms of points the previous year.
“We just felt like a change was needed to get our season going. It’s not essential, in my opinion. For the past two years, the core has done it. We had had enough of waiting around.
The one thing nearly everyone can agree on, in the wake of Sunday’s bloodletting and as the Oilers languish at the bottom of the league in their all-too-familiar state of turmoil, is that it’s not coaching.
In his brief tenure here, Woodcroft went 79-41-13, the sixth-best record in the league at the time. In his first playoff season, he finished 26-9-3 and advanced three rounds; in his second season, he finished 50-23-9 and advanced two rounds. Every time, it was the eventual Stanley Cup champions who eliminated them.
His terrible shortcoming, though, is that he failed to take a firm enough stance against a squad that has never taken defensive and puck management duties seriously. This season, the team’s defense—not just in goal—took a serious hit, and he was unable to turn it around.
