It’s been more than seven weeks, but Leon Draistaitl’s quote from the Oilers’ locker cleanout day continues to reverberate in Edmonton.Arguably the second best player of this era in the NHL threw down the gauntlet to his organization, two days after they were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, as he laid out the dire urgency related to teammate Connor McDavid’s contractual status.“In what world do you have the best player in the world on your team and you’re not looking to win?” an exasperated Draisaitl said. “And I know we’re looking to win. But we need to be better.“He’s signed for two more years, and god knows where that goes. But we have two years here right now. And we have to get significantly better.”Last season, the Oilers got significantly worse. They received an absolute gift when McDavid signed on for just $12.5 million a season through 2028, a show-me extension meant to give Edmonton management more financial freedom. They deployed it by handing $3.85 million to a forward who had four goals and seven points in the regular season (Trent Frederic); $7 million to a defenseman who skated on their third pair in the playoffs (Jake Walman); and $5.375 million to a goaltender who arrived after recently clearing waivers and wound up sitting on the bench for most of their first-round loss to the Ducks (Tristan Jarry).In the standings, the Oilers fell to 93 points, a figure that wouldn’t have made the playoffs in the Eastern Conference and a points percentage that was their worst since way back in 2018-19. Despite having both McDavid and Draisaitl locked in for a reasonable $26.5 million, and the NHL’s top power-play unit, the Oilers were somehow the NHL’s 14th-best team, behind 10 clubs without anything close to that star power.Which brings us to Mike Babcock, who was announced as the Oilers’ next head coach on Tuesday.Last week, in closing its investigation of Babcock’s troubled 78-day tenure as the Columbus Blue Jackets coach three years ago, the NHL determined that, in the words of a league statement, “even in a light least favorable to Mr. Babcock, there is no current basis to restrict his employment in the league.”The NHLPA, meanwhile, released a statement calling Babcock’s conduct in Columbus “very concerning,” and stated that “moving forward, we expect that Mr. Babcock will uphold the high standards required of NHL head coaches.”Without relitigating everything that happened in Columbus here (and Babcock’s previous stop in Toronto), you might be wondering why a supposedly contending team like the Oilers, with two of the best players in the world in their primes, would want to hire a coach with the sort of black cloud around them that even required such an investigation. The answer goes back to the urgency Draisaitl’s words above have invoked in the organization, although urgency is probably not a strong enough characterization.It seems fair to call it desperation.Once it became clear the Vegas Golden Knights weren’t going to allow former coach Bruce Cassidy to interview with a division rival in Edmonton, the Oilers surveyed the available coaching landscape for someone who could pull them out of their current morass and were thoroughly underwhelmed. They wanted someone with plenty of NHL head-coaching experience and a winning pedigree who could provide an instant jolt of adrenaline, someone unafraid to rattle cages and do things differently than the softer touches that had come before. They have also been through a zillion coaches already, a ridiculous 11 men since 2008-09. Just two have lasted more than 171 regular season games.The answer to this conundrum became Babcock in part because of the lack of suitable candidates but also because of his background on the ice. Whatever you will say about his methodology — and we’ll get to that — he was one of the NHL’s highest-profile success stories for years, including taking a no-name Anaheim Mighty Ducks team to the final in 2003, winning a Stanley Cup with Detroit in 2008, and coaching Team Canada to five gold medals at the Olympics, World Cup, World Championship and World Juniors.He is the only coach in the history of the sport to accomplish all of that, even if the most recent title came a decade ago and behind the bench of one of the best rosters ever assembled (Canada at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey). In a league that loves a retread, he is the ultimate retread, someone who reached the absolute peak of his profession before things went badly sideways.Oilers should be careful what they wish forSean Gentille and Sean McIndoeThings didn’t really start to go off the rails for Babcock until his time in Toronto, which I covered up close for the four and a half seasons he lasted on that record-setting eight-year, $50 million contract signed in 2015. (The Maple Leafs had offered him 10 years.)We’re going back a decade, but at his best, Babcock was able to coach up an overmatched roster, preaching a relentless, old-school, “grit-and-grind” style that allowed Toronto to make the 2016-17 playoffs with seven rookies in the lineup, a year after finishing dead-last in the NHL. But at his worst, Babcock was prone to incidents like the one that occurred with Mitch Marner that season, when he put the then-rookie through a demoralizing exercise that included forced criticism of veteran teammates.While Babcock and some of his defenders have cast that incident as a one-off mistake, that’s simply not the case if you examine the larger body of work. There are too many stories from too many of his former players for that to be true — notably from Johan Franzen and backed up by his former Red Wings teammates, and from Mark Fraser, a respected former Leafs player who became their director of culture and inclusion and posted a long statement on social media after Babcock was fired by the team in November 2019, the last time he was actually behind an NHL bench.After the NHL’s recent clearance of Babcock to coach again, one more voice was added to that chorus when Daniel Winnik, a veteran who played under Babcock in Toronto, went on a local radio station and argued emphatically that the Oilers should not hire him.“He’s the only guy that has ever made me hate hockey,” Winnik said. “I just hated coming to the rink. He’s just a bully … I just think how he treats people is not great. And that’s been well-documented at this point.”Over time, more than anything else, that alleged poor treatment of people led to his losing the room in Toronto, especially after his on-ice tactics came into question following back-to-back first-round series losses. They seemed to lose respect for the man more than for the coach.Adding all of this baggage to the fact that Babcock hasn’t coached an NHL game in nearly seven years and hasn’t won a playoff series since way back in 2012-13, it highlights how much of a gamble this hire is for Edmonton, a team for whom everything is on the line.Edmonton’s view is that there is a world where hiring a renowned jerk can work. Sports teams do it all the time, including as GMs, coaches and players. Plus the Oilers are only a year removed from back-to-back trips to the Stanley Cup Final, and they still have plenty of talent. Perhaps, with full buy-in from McDavid, Draisaitl and the Oilers’ other best players — including Zach Hyman, who excelled under Babcock in Toronto — there’s a path for the 63-year-old coach to rediscover what led to his earlier, distant success. No one has ever questioned his work ethic or commitment.Step one in that process will require Babcock to be a humbled, reformed version of himself in Edmonton, someone who has learned from all this feedback from players. The entire hockey world is going to be watching his every move, starting today, and things could unravel fast if another young player comes forward with complaints the way they did in Columbus in 2023.And the organization Babcock has joined is already in the midst of some existential turmoil, with fingers being pointed and a contention window that’s closing fast.To paraphrase Draisaitl’s words, the Oilers have two years here right now, with McDavid under contract, to ensure this isn’t a lost era for the franchise. But the reality is if this gamble on a disgraced coach fails and they stumble yet again, it could very well become one.They can’t risk letting McDavid walk for nothing next July, meaning it’s all-in on 2026-27. And, unbelievably, that means it’s all-in on the Mike Babcock reclamation project.