Four Games In, the Defense Has Changed. The Close Ones Haven't.

Edmonton is 15–22 in one-goal games. Sit with that for a moment before celebrating the four-game winning streak, because that record is not a footnote—it is the actual story of this team's season.

The defensive transformation is real, and I've said so in this space before. Babcock's system has cut Edmonton's goals-against from 3.7 per game over the prior 20-game window down to 2.2 over the last 10—a genuine, meaningful shift that represents exactly what he was hired to deliver. The Oilers are harder to score on. That is true. What is also true is that being harder to score on has not yet made them harder to beat when the game is decided by a single goal. A 41% win rate in one-goal contests, against a 52% overall baseline—that eleven-point gap is not noise. It is a pattern that predates Babcock, survived the coaching change, and is still sitting there, unresolved, after four straight wins.

Here is what makes this particularly stubborn: the problem is not talent. Connor McDavid has 82 points in 48 games. Leon Draisaitl has 68. Evan Bouchard is logging nearly 25 minutes a night from the blue line. The roster, when healthy, is elite at the top. The issue is something that elite point totals do not capture—the specific discipline required to protect a one-goal lead in the third period, to generate the right shot at the right moment when the game is knotted, to execute when the margin for error collapses to zero. Those are habits, not talent. And habits take longer than four games to build.

What Babcock has demonstrated so far is that he can reshape the roster around his system in real time. A depth forward has seen his ice time drop by more than four minutes per game over the last 10 contests—that kind of ruthless optimization is the hallmark of a coach who knows exactly what he wants from each line. The Formenton signing, which drew genuine skepticism when Bowman announced it in September, looks more defensible each week as Babcock finds ways to use depth that fits his structure. The pieces are being arranged. The question is whether the arrangement can produce something the previous regime never could: consistent execution when the game is on the line.

The 2025–26 season is the cautionary backdrop here. Edmonton finished 43–45, a steep fall from the 64-win and 62-win campaigns that preceded it. The collapse was not uniform—December and March were genuinely good months—but the team repeatedly failed to convert competitive performances into wins when the margin was thin. February went 1–4. April went 5–8. The pattern was not a slump; it was a recurring structural failure in close games, and it cost the Oilers a playoff position. Babcock was brought in precisely because the previous approach could not solve it. Four games into his tenure, the defense is better. The close-game problem is identical.

My read is that the real test of this coaching change will not come in a blowout win or a dominant period. It will come in the third period of a 2–1 game on the road in January, when the structure Babcock has been building either holds or it doesn't. The defensive numbers give reason for optimism. The one-goal record gives reason for caution. Both things are true, and right now the optimism is getting all the attention.