When a team underperforms, the coach is always the first one fans blame.
It’s the most visible target, the most satisfying one, and in Edmonton right now, Kris Knoblauch has been squarely in the crosshairs.
The calls for his job have been loud, and look, that’s not an unreasonable conversation to have. Coaching matters. But it might also be too simple an answer for what’s actually going on.
Because the Oilers’ inconsistency this season doesn’t feel like a single-point failure.
Paul Coffey's return to the bench was a move that landed well, and pretty much universally so. Having a Hockey Hall of Famer with that kind of credibility working with your defensemen gets things done.
The reception around the league and within the organization suggested it was a decision that made sense to everyone involved. And it’s worth noting as evidence that the organization is at least willing to make moves when the situation calls for it.
But Coffey alone doesn’t solve everything, and the deeper question worth asking is whether the real problem in Edmonton is between the bench and the front office. Knoblauch and Stan Bowman. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect there’s a disconnect there. Not a dramatic falling out or anything that necessarily makes headlines, but the quieter, more corrosive kind of disconnect that exists in many organizations and tends to show up in strange ways.
Players getting signed that a coach isn’t entirely sold on. Ice time distributed in ways that don’t reflect what the roster was built to do. Prospects or depth players not getting a genuine look despite being dressed and ready to contribute.
David Tomasek comes to mind. Here’s a player who was in the system and given a limited opportunity, and who represents the kind of question fans are starting to ask — are the right people getting the right chances?
Whether that’s a coaching decision, a GM preference, or some combination of both is unclear. And that’s the honest thing to say here: we don’t know what’s said behind closed doors.
We don’t know which decisions belong to Bowman, to Knoblauch, and where these two men actually agree or disagree. What follows is speculation, one theory among several, and it should be taken as exactly that.
What we can say is that when a team has the talent Edmonton has, not just in McDavid and Draisaitl (though they're pretty talented) but in younger players too, and the results are still inconsistent, the problem probably isn’t one person. It rarely is.
Organizations that struggle tend to struggle for multiple reasons, and blaming the coach, firing him, and starting over only works if the coach was actually the problem. Do it when it isn’t, and you’ve changed one variable while leaving everything else constant.
The trade deadline is worth watching closely, probably more than people are giving it credit for right now. It’s approaching faster than it feels, and while the expectation is probably for smaller moves, depth pieces, a rental here or there, there’s always the possibility that something bigger gets done if the right opportunity presents itself.
Bowman has shown a willingness to be aggressive when he believes in a move, and if there’s an area of the roster that needs addressing rather than just reshuffling, the deadline is the moment to do it.
The easy answer is always the coach. It’s clean, it’s decisive, and it gives fans something concrete to point to. But Edmonton’s issues this season have a more complicated feel to them, and the solution, if there is one, probably lives somewhere in the space between the bench, the front office, and the roster moves still left to be made.
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