It's rare for a Stanley Cup contender to fire its coach this late in the season. But if the struggling Edmonton Oilers decide to go that route right now, Peter DeBoer would be a terrific fit.
Out of an NHL job for the first time in 17 years, Peter DeBoer told The Hockey News last week that he is in no rush to get back behind the bench.
It's got to be the right team, he said, in the right place and at the right time. The thinking is that DeBoer, who last coached Dallas to the conference final in 2025, will be in high demand in the summer, when a team like Toronto, Los Angeles or Edmonton might consider a coaching change.
But if you're the Oilers, you might not be able to wait that long.
There are fewer than four weeks until the playoffs begin, and the Oilers don't look like a team that will head to the Stanley Cup final for a third straight year. Instead, after losing four of their past six games, they look like a team coming apart at the seams and starting to point fingers at all that is going wrong.
The person feeling the most heat lately is coach Kris Knoblauch, who, in a roundabout way, was criticized by Connor McDavid following a 5-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday.
In a post-game interview, the Oilers captain called the Jon Cooper-coached Lightning "perfectly coached," "extremely well organized" and "very, very rehearsed in everything that they do."
When asked for his views on the Oilers' style, McDavid said "that's a coaching question," before adding "we're somewhat rehearsed and organized — but not to their level."
That's the kind of honest assessment that could come back to haunt Knoblauch, if he's unable to get the Oilers deep into the playoffs this year.
Then again, with 11 games remaining in the regular season, maybe the time to pull the plug on Knoblauch should come sooner than that.
Coaches don't typically lose their jobs this late in the season — especially ones who are behind the bench of a playoff-bound team — but it's happened before.
On March 1, the Los Angeles Kings fired Jim Hillier and replaced him with associate coach D.J. Smith in the interim. At the time, the Kings were tied for the ninth-most points in the Western Conference, only three points back of the final wild-card spot. Since then, the Kings have gone 4-4-3 and are two points back.
A year ago, John Tortorella was fired on March 27, with just eight games remaining in the regular season. Of course, the Flyers were the second-worst team in the Eastern Conference at the time.
You have to go back nearly three decades to find a Stanley Cup-contending team that made a coaching change this late in the year. It happened in 1999-2000, when the New Jersey Devils fired coach Robbie Ftorek, who had led the team to the best record in the Eastern Conference, with eight games left in the season.
At the time, the Devils had lost 10 of their previous 16 games.
"We were not playing to our capabilities, in my mind," GM Lou Lamoriello said at the time. "I did not see this changing. I did not think we would come out of this slump... and go forward."
Knee-jerk reaction or not, it turned out to be the right move.
The Devils, who replaced Ftorek with assistant coach Larry Robinson, went on to win the Stanley Cup.
Could DeBoer do the same? Possibly.
The 57-year-old is a two-time Stanley Cup finalist. He's also someone who has taken three different teams to the conference final in six of the past eight years. Most recently, DeBoer was behind the bench in Dallas, where he got a first-hand look at an Oilers team that defeated the Stars in five games in the conference final.
DeBoer was fired after losing that series.
And while he has spent the past year out of the NHL, he technically hasn't left the bench. He was an associate coach on Canada's Olympic team, where he had the opportunity to coach McDavid.
DeBoer said that Olympic experience, combined with taking a breather from the daily grind of the NHL, has provided him with a new perspective on coaching.
"I know I'm a better coach for it," he said.
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