Edmonton brought Mike Babcock out of retirement in June, handed him the bench, and told him to make the Oilers harder to play against. In his first NHL game since Toronto fired him in 2019, they gave up six goals and lost to the team that finished dead last in the league a year ago. The hire was supposed to fix this. Game one looked like the same old problem.
The Canucks won 6-5 in overtime at Rogers Place on Tuesday. Edmonton scored a ton and defended none of it. Evan Bouchard put up a five-point night from the blue line and it meant nothing, because the other end of the ice was a turnstile. Babcock knew it. He called the loss "ridiculous," said "we have to set a better standard for ourselves," and put it bluntly: "You can't have a guy with five points and lose the hockey game."
He's right, and it's self-inflicted. Edmonton turned the puck over, stayed out too long on shifts, and made poor decisions, those are Babcock's own words. This is a roster built to win track meets and it keeps getting dragged into them. A team can lead and trail and lead again all night and still be fundamentally broken, and a defense that surrenders six in an opener at home is broken no matter who's running the whiteboard. You don't un-teach that in one training camp, no matter how many Stanley Cup Finals the new coach has on his résumé.
The chaos cuts both ways. Vancouver blew a 5-2 lead midway through the third after scoring three times in just over four minutes, and the Oilers clawed all the way back, with former Canuck Vasily Podkolzin tying it with 43 seconds left and Tristan Jarry pulled. The firepower is real. The issue is whether anyone in that room can protect a lead, and the answer on opening night was no. Babcock flagged it himself: three chances given up in the first minute and a half of overtime.
Vancouver went 25-49-8 last season and finished last. New GM Ryan Johnson blew it up, fired Adam Foote in May, and handed the bench to Manny Malhotra, who won his NHL coaching debut here. Malhotra's first move was to throw Max Sasson, who skated 16:37, straight at Connor McDavid all night. McDavid finished with two assists. Sasson scored and set up the winner. Edmonton tried to isolate the matchup and it backfired. That's coaching, and it's the kind of detail a last-place team didn't have last year.
Paul Cotter was the finisher, scoring twice, including the overtime winner 1:59 in, deking to his backhand past Jarry. It was his Canucks debut, after signing a one-year deal worth $2.15 million this past offseason. He probably won't keep scoring at this rate. Reading a season into one wild opener is how fans get themselves hurt every October.
The Sasson-on-McDavid plan was a deliberate decision, and it worked. Through one game, Vancouver is 1-0-0 and Edmonton is 0-0-1, which doesn't mean much yet. Edmonton hired the biggest-name fixer on the market and still couldn't defend a lead. The team that finished last in the league a year ago looked organized. Edmonton can score at will. Protecting a lead is the problem, and Babcock found that out in one night.
