Two months ago, Oilers GM Ken Holland said he was pondering a contract extension for head coach Dave Tippett. On Thursday, with Edmonton slipping further out of the playoff race, Holland fired him.
"It’s a tough day," said Holland. "It’s a disappointing day. When you have this press conference, it means your team’s not playing up to expectations, and that’s on me."
It was Tippet and Oilers associate coach Jim Playfair who paid for it. After a strong start to the season in which Edmonton won nine of its first 10 games, one of the most talented teams in the NHL has endured losing streaks of six games and seven games to fall five points out of the playoffs -- part of a skid where Holland said "anything that could go wrong, did go wrong."
Holland pulled the plug on Tippet, who he hired in the 2019 offseason in his first month as GM following a 36-year stint with the Red Wings, after the Oilers lost two straight home games coming out of the All-Star break. They had won five of six entering the break.
"It’s been up and down like a toilet seat," said Holland. There’s stretches where we play pretty good and then we don’t play good, and it feels to me like we’ve been chasing the game for two months."
The Oilers boast the NHL's last two MVP's in Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, who are also two of the league's top three scorers this season. But they're on pace for their worst finish under Holland, who said his "instincts" told him that if he "waited 10 more games (to make a coaching change), it might be too late."
"I can’t tell you it’s coaching," he said of the team's inconsistency. "Obviously I’m here because I changed the coach, but again, I built the team. So if the team’s not good enough, that’s on me. But certainly as we’re sitting here today, I felt that I needed to do something to see if we could get a better result. Now we watch."
In his 22 years as GM of the Red Wings, Holland noted that Detroit had four head coaches. The Oilers are on their ninth head coach in the last 13 years, with Jay Woodcroft, head coach of Edmonton's AHL team, taking over for Tippet. Thursday marked the first time Holland has fired a coach midway through the season.
"I’ve always been able to get through the year," he said. "Scotty Bowman retired, Mike Babcock decided to leave. I let Dave Lewis go for Mike Babcock, but first time in my career I’ve let a coach go mid-season. I would say to you, it’s a gut feel."
And now we watch.