Mark Messier is an ESPN NHL analyst now, and on the network’s own Opening Night media call this week, he said he’s “horrified” that the Oilers hired Mike Babcock. ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski, who was on the same call, posted the moment himself:
https://twitter.com/wyshynski/status/2102849011883618504
This isn’t a rival executive lobbing a grenade for attention. It’s Messier, on his own network’s call, about the team that made him a legend, with a colleague sitting right there to post it.
“I’m absolutely shocked they hired him,” Messier told reporters. “I’m absolutely shocked that from the stories that I heard from very good, reputable character people about the way they were treated.”
Babcock walked away from the Columbus Blue Jackets in 2023, weeks after taking the job and before he coached a single game, after players said he’d asked to see personal photos on their phones. The NHL opened a review into the allegations, one that took nearly three years to resolve. On June 18 of this year, the league closed it by finding there was “no current basis to restrict his employment in the League.”
Five days later, Edmonton hired him anyway, replacing Kris Knoblauch, who’d been fired that May after three seasons behind the bench. Babcock said meetings with Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Zach Hyman talked him back into coaching, and the résumé explains why Edmonton made the call: 700 career wins, twelfth all time, two Olympic golds with Team Canada, stints in Anaheim, Detroit and Toronto.
None of that mattered to Messier, who spent 12 of his 25 NHL seasons in Edmonton, won five of his six Stanley Cups there, and has his number retired in the rafters. Messier said he’s horrified by the Babcock hire not because of what was alleged in Columbus, but because of what happens if it happens again in Edmonton. “I just don’t know if it does go bad and players are having difficulties, who do they turn to?” he said. “Because if they turn to the leadership, the leadership is management. I am just horrified about the whole thing.”
That’s an Oilers legend breaking cover on his own team, without being asked twice.
Messier isn’t accusing the Oilers of ignoring due process. The league reviewed the allegations and cleared Babcock to coach again, which says as much about institutional standards as anything Messier said. His real complaint is about the chain of command: if a player has a problem with the new coach, the person he reports to is the front office that just hired that coach anyway. There’s no third party in that chain, no buffer between a complaint and the executives who already vouched for the guy the complaint is about.
Edmonton made this move in a summer full of coaching turnover across the league, and you can scroll through more NHL coverage without finding another hire that got called horrifying, unprompted, by the franchise’s own retired number.
Edmonton just found out its own legends don’t trust it either.
