Edmonton Oilers fire McLellan, hire Hitchcock to take over
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Ken Hitchcock knows the routine well by now as he begins his tenure as new coach of the Edmonton Oilers. For the fourth time in his long coaching career, Hitchcock has been tasked with taking over a struggling team in the middle of the season.
Hitchcock was hired Tuesday as coach of his hometown Oilers after the team fired Todd McLellan with the team languishing in sixth place in the Pacific Division.
“It’s not going to change overnight, but we can start taking some steps,” said Hitchcock, who led St. Louis to a first-place finish in 2011-12 after taking over as coach one month into the season. “I told the players today I can take them to a place personally that they can’t get to themselves, but they’ve got to buy into that, and it’s not going to be comfortable at times.”
The Oilers have lost six of seven games, getting outscored 27-11 in those losses, in a rough start to McLellan’s fourth season behind the bench. The team missed the playoffs in two of his previous three seasons despite having superstar Connor McDavid on its roster and the Oilers were just 9-10-1 entering their game Tuesday night at San Jose.
“It’s tough to pinpoint what we need, but we’re all to blame here,” McDavid said. “This obviously isn’t on Todd at all. It’s on us as players. That’s just how the business works sometimes. We got to wake up here.”
McLellan is the fourth coach to be fired already this season, following John Stevens in Los Angeles, Joel Quenneville in Chicago and Mike Yeo in St. Louis. The Oilers are ahead of only the Blues and the Kings in the Western Conference standings.
“Obviously we’re in a rough patch here,” general manager Peter Chiarelli said. “We’re leading into American Thanksgiving. It’s a bit of a template for making the playoffs. I felt I was seeing some things that I had seen last year after not seeing them for quite a fair bit this year, and these recurring themes, I wanted to nip them in the bud.”