Connor McDavid didn't take the bait Thursday. The Oilers captain handled Mark Messier's criticism of the Mike Babcock hire with a polite shrug.
"Everybody has their opinion and obviously he's one of the greats of the game and he's entitled to his opinion," McDavid said.
Messier went a lot further on an ESPN media conference call. The six-time Stanley Cup champion said he was "absolutely shocked" by the hire, citing stories from "very good, reputable, character people."
His bigger complaint is structural. Messier took issue with the Oilers' leadership group having a hand in the hiring of its own coach.
"The leadership of your team has to protect the players inside the dressing room," he said.
"How can you do that when you're directly involved with the decisions they're making at the management level and hiring of the management and coaches?"
Babcock answered with his dad's old line about only caring what you think if your knees hit his kitchen table. "The rest is just noise," he said, before ending the scrum.
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McDavid fires back at Mark Messier after Oilers criticism
No. 97 insists the separation Messier worries about is real. "I think you've seen in the first couple of days of camp that there is pretty good gap there," he said.
"That's what Babs does," the captain added, pointing to a coach who doesn't pick favorites when he's handing out orders.
But where does a player go if he has a problem with the coach his own leadership group helped bring in?
McDavid says the answer is still him. "For sure, absolutely. Our organization has its layers just like everyone else's," he said.
It's a bit like asking the guy who recommended the contractor to judge the renovation. He might be honest, but nobody would call him neutral.
Letting your stars help pick the coach is a bad idea, and it stays a bad idea even when the wins show up.
The Oilers hired Babcock in June, and the 63-year-old hadn't coached an NHL game since 2019.
He stepped away from Columbus in 2023 before training camp, after controversy over requests he made to players for personal photos.
That history is why every word out of this room gets weighed so closely, with Leon Draisaitl at $14,000,000 and the captain at $12,500,000 riding on the answer.
So far, the results haven't handed Messier any evidence. The Oilers improved to 3-0-0 this preseason with a 2-1 win in Vancouver last night.
McDavid and Draisaitl didn't dress for that one. Isaac Howard and Quinn Hutson scored instead, and Babcock got another quiet night.
Calgary visits Saturday. Then the Oilers open the regular season against the Canucks at Rogers Place on Tuesday.
The first real losing streak will show whether that gap McDavid described holds up, or whether Messier just said out loud what others were thinking.
Is Mark Messier right that Oilers players should never have a say in hiring their coach?
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