Struggling Oilers fire head coach Tippett

EDMONTON — With the Edmonton Oilers on the brink of a lost season and having little salarycap flexibility available, Ken Holland had really only one option to shake up his team.

On Thursday, the Oilers president of hockey operations/ general manager fired head coach Dave Tippett and assistant coach Jim Playfair. Holland then named Jay Woodcroft, who’d been coaching Edmonton’s AHL affiliate in Bakersfield, California, as the NHL team’s head coach while bringing assistant coach Dave Manson with him.

Holland told reporters he simply doesn’t have the ability to make the sort of trade-deadline deal where Edmonton gives up prospects and picks for highpriced veteran help.

“If we want to add $2 million, we’ve got to move $2 million,” Holland said.

Later on, Holland was even more blunt.

“The solution probably has to be in the room,” he said.

Holland described Edmonton’s season as “being up and down like a toilet seat.” Led by red-hot starts by star forwards Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid, the Oilers rocketed out of the gate, winning 16 of their 21 games. But then came losing streaks, including a brutal 2-11-2 stretch, as the franchise went from having the Western Conference’s best record to now being outside of the playoff picture.

But there was some hope as Edmonton went 5-0-1 before the all-star break. But, with a compressed schedule ahead thanks to many rescheduled games the result of the Omicron wave, the Oilers got off to an awful postbreak start, losing at home 4-0 to the Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday, then 4-1 to Chicago on Wednesday.

It was in the third period of Wednesday night’s game that Holland recognized he had to make a coaching change. In more than a quarter century of running teams in Detroit and Edmonton, Holland had never made an in-season coaching change before Thursday.

“We played a great second period, and I hoped we could rally in the third, but we didn’t,” he said. “As the third period wound down, then, after I went home and I was by myself, I thought.

“And then I talked to a couple of people last night and then I got up in the morning and I talked to Mr. Katz [Oilers owner Daryl Katz] and said that I felt I needed to make a change.”