Babcock's Opening Night Is Eighteen Days Away. Edmonton Isn't Ready.

Somewhere between a petition with thousands of signatures, a missing starting goaltender, and a fanbase that just watched its most recognizable superfan walk out the door, Mike Babcock is supposed to be building a Stanley Cup contender. The calendar says the Oilers open at home against Vancouver on September 29. The roster says something considerably more complicated.

Let's be direct: this is not a team in crisis. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are among the two or three most dangerous offensive players on the planet, and the late-season defensive tightening last year — allowing just 2.3 goals per game over the final ten games after hemorrhaging four a night in the stretch before that — gave Babcock something real to build on when he took the job. The bones are there. But bones alone don't win close games, and the Oilers won only 37% of their one-goal contests last season. That number is the franchise's quiet killer, and it doesn't get fixed by good intentions in September.

It gets fixed by depth, by goaltending, and by organizational coherence. Right now, Edmonton is short on all three.

Five players are currently out: Frederik Andersen, Adam Henrique, Matt Savoie, Mattias Janmark, and defenseman Alec Regula. The Andersen absence is the one that should keep Bowman up at night. The organization signed him specifically in July to provide veteran stability in net — the kind of playoff-tested presence a coach like Babcock needs when he's installing a defensive system from scratch. That plan is on hold before it ever started. GM Stan Bowman suggested Savoie's timeline could be short, which is the best news in an otherwise grim medical report, but five absences eighteen days out is not a depth problem. It's a structural one.

And into that gap walks Alex Formenton, signed to a one-year deal at $850,000, his first NHL contract since 2021. Formenton is acquitted. The legal process ran its course. But the hockey question — whether this is the right use of a roster spot, at this moment, for this team — is entirely separate, and the backlash answers it loudly. Thousands signed a petition to reverse the move. 'Mama Stanley,' the kind of superfan franchises spend decades cultivating, withdrew her support. When you're asking a new coach to establish culture and command a locker room, the last thing you need is the fanbase in open revolt over a depth forward before the first puck drops. History offers a clear lesson here: coaching tenures that begin under organizational friction — think the final years of the Rangers under Alain Vigneault, or the chaos that consumed early Maple Leafs regimes before Babcock himself arrived in Toronto — rarely survive long enough to fix the underlying problems. The noise becomes the story. The story becomes the season.

Babcock is a different animal. His record speaks for itself — Stanley Cups, Olympic gold, and a career built on imposing structure on talented, restless teams. But even he could not sustain the culture he built in Toronto when the organization stopped rowing in the same direction. That's the cautionary tale. The Oilers, to their credit, have done real work this offseason: Connor Murphy arrives on a five-year deal to shore up the blue line, Jason Dickinson is back on a long-term commitment to anchor the defensive center depth, and Evan Bouchard gives Babcock a genuine offensive engine from the back end. The pieces for a legitimate rebuild of identity are present.

My declaration is this: the Oilers will not be a playoff team by November. They will be a .500 team in October, absorbing the injury attrition and the Formenton noise and the growing pains of a new system, and the question that will define the season is whether Babcock can hold the locker room together long enough for the roster to get healthy and the fanbase to refocus on the hockey. McDavid and Draisaitl are too good for this team to be bad for long. But "not bad for long" and "ready to open the season" are two very different things — and right now, Edmonton is only one of them.