The Edmonton Oilers have faced much adversity this season and in the NHL playoffs, but coach Kris Knoblauch has made calculated moves that paid off brilliantly. Will they pay off?

The contrast between the personalities of the two coaches in the Stanley Cup final couldn’t be more striking. 

Down in Florida, you’ve got witty Paul Maurice holding court, cracking jokes and making himself the center of attention to help take some pressure off his players. 

Maurice doesn’t have a Cup, but he has seen it all. His 1,848 games coached, going back to 1995, are the most of any active coach and the second-most of all time in the NHL, behind only Scotty Bowman.

Up in Alberta, Kris Knoblauch is heading into his first Stanley Cup final after just 69 regular-season games behind an NHL bench.

Many observers are giving the Panthers the edge to win because of their experience last year, but Knoblauch is an X-factor who elevates the Oilers beyond what Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl will bring to the table.

Let's start with Knoblauch coaching Edmonton to a .703 points percentage over his regular-season games. That works out to a 115-point pace over a full year, which would have been one point better than the Presidents’ Trophy-winning New York Rangers.

During the playoffs, Knoblauch has also been masterful with his player deployment. He got struggling Stuart Skinner out of the net for two games against Vancouver and then successfully got him back in. He shifted around his top players and also made smaller tweaks in his bottom six and on defense. 

Almost everything has worked, whether that's how he managed Draisaitl during an injury scare early in the second round or worked young defenseman Philip Broberg into the lineup against Dallas after he spent most of the season in exile in Bakersfield. 

Even oft-maligned Connor Brown goes into the final as a regular and has seen his ice time rise thanks to his strong penalty-killing and responsible two-way play — part of Edmonton's new-found defensive conscience that has been a linchpin of the team's success.

Before the Oilers brought him in on Nov. 12 to turn around a team closer to the league's basement than a playoff spot, Knoblauch’s NHL experience consisted of two seasons as an assistant with the Philadelphia Flyers starting in 2017. He worked under Dave Hakstol, then interim coach Scott Gordon after Hakstol was fired in December 2018. 

When Alain Vigneault joined the Flyers during the summer of 2019, Knoblauch landed with the AHL’s Hartford Wolf Pack. As part of that gig, he went 6-1-1 as interim coach of the New York Rangers when David Quinn and Gerard Gallant were away due to COVID-19 absences.

Before Philadelphia, Knoblauch had a successful run at the junior level. His Kootenay Ice won the 2011 WHL championship — with 18-year-old Max Reinhart leading the team and his 15-year-old kid brother, Sam Reinhart, appearing in seven playoff games.

Then, in 2017, Knoblauch led an Erie Otters squad that included Alex DeBrincat, Dylan Strome, Anthony Cirelli and current Oiler Warren Foegele to an OHL title — two years after Connor McDavid graduated from the Otters to the NHL.

So Knoblauch has won at lower levels. But for someone whose only NHL playoff experience before this year was a first-round loss to the Penguins when he was with Philadelphia in 2018, he has been impressively unflappable during Edmonton’s post-season run so far.

All the pressure of being ‘Canada’s team’ hasn’t fazed him, not even when Edmonton was down 3-2 to Vancouver in the second round. And brief bursts of drama like the goaltending questions and the criticism aimed at Darnell Nurse in the conference final have fizzled out quickly. Perhaps taking a page from their coach's playbook, the Oilers players have astutely avoided being baited into delivering quotes that could cause division or turn into bulletin-board material.

The spotlight will get even brighter, starting with media day in Sunrise, Fla., on Friday. If Knoblauch can continue to keep the distractions at bay while maximizing the effectiveness of his roster, the Oilers’ chances of ending Canada’s 31-year Cup drought may be better than many people think.

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