Edmonton Oilers

Alberta first, and then the merger

Bill Hunter and Chuck Allard founded the club in 1971 as the Alberta Oilers, one of the first World Hockey Association franchises, and it had taken the Edmonton name before the rival league wound up. The team entered the NHL in 1979 as part of the WHA merger, carrying with it a teenager named Wayne Gretzky.

What followed compressed most of a club's history into seven seasons. Edmonton won the Stanley Cup in 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988 and 1990 with Gretzky, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri, Paul Coffey and Grant Fuhr; the 1984-85 side was voted the greatest team in NHL history during the league's centennial celebrations in 2017.

On 9 August 1988 Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings with Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski for US$15 million, Jimmy Carson and draft picks. The deal is still the reference point for what a small Canadian market can and cannot hold on to, and it reached the floor of the House of Commons at the time. Messier captained the last of the Cups two years later.

Twenty-five years of paying for it

The fall was long. Edmonton reached the 2006 Stanley Cup Final as an eighth seed and lost it to Carolina, then missed the playoffs for ten consecutive seasons from 2006 to 2015 — a run sustained by high draft picks that kept failing to compound.

The last of those picks did not fail. Connor McDavid went first overall in 2015 and was named captain in 2016 at nineteen, the youngest in league history. The club moved out of Rexall Place, its home since 1974, and opened Rogers Place in 2016; the first Oilers game there was on 12 October 2016 against Calgary, and a statue of Gretzky was unveiled outside the building that night. Edmonton were back in the playoffs by 2017.

Two Finals, then a first round

The peak of the McDavid era is two consecutive Stanley Cup Finals, in 2024 and 2025, both lost to the Florida Panthers. The 2025-26 season was supposed to be the third attempt and instead became a reckoning.

Edmonton finished 41-30-11 for 93 points, second in the Pacific Division. The offence held up: McDavid posted 138 points on 48 goals and 90 assists, Leon Draisaitl 97 points, and Evan Bouchard 95 from the blue line. Goaltending did not. In December 2025 the club traded Stuart Skinner and Brett Kulak to Pittsburgh for Tristan Jarry, who went 9-? with a 3.86 goals-against average; Connor Ingram, acquired in October 2025, carried 16 wins at 2.60.

Draisaitl's own account of the season is that the team never found a level and stayed there. Edmonton did not win three games in a row until late January and lost four of their last six. Anaheim beat them 4-2 in the first round between 20 and 30 April 2026, and Carolina went on to win the Cup.

The summer the bench changed

Kris Knoblauch was sacked on 14 May 2026, having gone 135-77-21 across 233 regular-season games and taken the club to two Finals, and having signed an extension through 2028-29 the previous October that was meant to start this season. General manager Stan Bowman's explanation was blunt: at this moment in time, the team needed something different from what it had before.

The replacement is the story. Mike Babcock was announced on 23 June 2026, five days after the NHL closed a reopened review of his conduct with the Columbus Blue Jackets. Babcock resigned there in 2023 without coaching a game, after reports that he had asked players to show him personal photographs on their phones; the league and the NHL Players' Association investigated at the time. On 18 June 2026 the league said its investigation had concluded that, even in a light least favourable to Babcock, there was no current basis to restrict his employment.

He arrives with 700 wins, twelfth on the all-time list, across 1,301 games and 17 seasons at Anaheim, Detroit and Toronto, a Stanley Cup with Detroit in 2008, Olympic gold in 2010 and 2014, and the 2016 World Cup of Hockey. His own reason for taking the job was short: knowing he would be working with Connor, Leon and Zach made the drive worth it.

The roster Babcock inherits

McDavid's two-year extension at a $12.5 million cap hit runs to the end of 2027-28 and is well below what he would have drawn on the open market — Kirill Kaprizov re-signed in Minnesota at $17 million a year. That discount is the window Edmonton are working inside.

The summer was spent on depth rather than stars. On 1 July the club signed goaltender Frederik Andersen, forward Mathieu Joseph, defenceman Ryan Shea on five years, Max Jones and Eduards Tralmaks, and acquired goaltender Devon Levi from Buffalo. Colton Dach signed for two years on 12 July, and Alex Formenton joined on a one-year deal at $850,000 on 9 September. Calvin Pickard left for Minnesota, Jack Roslovic for Toronto, and Adam Henrique and Connor Ingram came off the books.

Camp opened in mid-September with McDavid and Draisaitl both healthy after a longer summer than the previous two. The projected top line keeps Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman with McDavid; Draisaitl is expected to centre a second line with Vasily Podkolzin, though Matthew Savoie is out until around the end of October, which likely puts Kasperi Kapanen there to start. Rookie Isaac Howard is in line for a middle-six debut. Draisaitl has said he expects more continuity in the lineup this year than last.

Rogers Place on a game night

Rogers Place seats 18,347 for hockey and anchors the ICE District at 10220 104 Avenue NW, a short walk from Edmonton City Centre. Ford Hall, the north gates and the premium entrance open an hour before puck drop; Molson Hockey House and the Studio 99 sports bar open two hours out. Bags larger than 12 by 12 by 6 inches are refused at the door, and entry is mobile ticketing only.

The 2026-27 schedule is 84 games, the first expanded regular season since 2003-04. Edmonton open at home to Vancouver on 29 September and play the return leg on 1 October; Carolina visit on 22 October. An eight-game homestand runs through late January and February around the All-Star break, with two six-game road trips in November and around the turn of the year, and the season closes with a home-and-home against Winnipeg on 7 and 10 April.

The building's own rituals are recent and local. "La Bamba" plays after home wins — it was the favourite song of Joey Moss, the locker-room attendant with Down syndrome who worked for the club for more than three decades after meeting Gretzky in the mid-1980s and who died on 26 October 2020 at 57. The phrase "play 'La Bamba', baby" caught on when young supporter Ben Stelter shouted it during the 2022 playoff run. In the playoffs the Ford Tailgate Party in ICE District Plaza, known to most people in the city as the Moss Pit, puts more than 5,000 people outside the arena in front of a screen.