Thirty minutes after the press conference ended, Mike Babcock walks down the north stairs and made his way through a quiet corner of Rogers Place.
He found me. Shook my hand. I wanted to ask him about Emma Lake - where, I think, he has a place - in Saskatchewan: something small, a thread of common ground between two people just beginning to figure each other out.
I have cerebral palsy. My speech has never come easily. So I tried again. He leaned in. I said it a third time, then a fourth, then a fifth.
Most people reach their limit somewhere around the third attempt. The smile softens. The eyes drift. There is a graceful, practiced exit, and I have learned to recognize it from a long way off.
Babcock didn’t take it.
He stood there and said, simply and without embarrassment: “I’m sorry I can’t understand you. The next time we talk, I’ll find someone to help me understand you.”
No performance. No hollow warmth. Just an honest man, acknowledging the limits of what he could do in that moment and promising to do better the next time.
It was one of the quieter things that happened on Tuesday, and it has stayed with me longer than anything said at the podium.
That kind of moment has a way of pulling older memories to the surface.
It was 1995. I was on a bus rolling north from Red Deer to Edmonton, covering a group of NHL oldtimers playing charity games for the Edmonton Journal. Guy Lafleur was sitting in front of me - The Flower himself, cigarette in hand, watching the highway unspool in the dark.
We got to talking about Scotty Bowman.
He didn’t pause for a moment. “I didn’t like him,” Lafleur told me. “But did I respect him? Absolutely.”
I have carried that sentence for 31 years. It has a way of surfacing whenever the world asks us to hold two complicated things at once - to resist the urge to flatten a person into either a hero or a verdict, and instead sit with the harder, more honest question of what they actually are.
This week, that question came back with some force.
On Tuesday, the Edmonton Oilers made it official. Mike Babcock is the 19th head coach in franchise history.
For two weeks before that announcement, this city had been living inside a soap opera of its own making.
The moment Babcock’s name surfaced, his off-ice past - well documented, long debated - was pulled back into the light. Social media moved at its usual velocity. Thousands of posts, maybe more.
Some of it fair, some of it noise, and very little of it quiet.
I went to the press conference. The assembled media asked the hard questions, and they were right to ask them. Babcock answered without flinching and without offering anyone a headline.
There was no apology, no confession, no moment of public reckoning - only a coach, sitting at a table, talking about hockey.
The conversation this city is having about Babcock’s past is not over, and it should not be. Those questions belong to Edmonton, and they will continue to be asked and answered in the days and months ahead.
That is how it ought to work.
But underneath the noise, there is also this: an organization that has looked honestly at its moment and decided to meet it. Connor McDavid is the best player on the planet. Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins are with him. Ownership, management, and the players are all pointed in the same direction.
The window that opens when you have a talent like McDavid does not stay open indefinitely, and the Oilers have made a clear, deliberate choice to climb through it while they still can. Edmonton fans deserve to feel something about that - not certainty, perhaps, but genuine hope.
Earlier that morning, I had watched Babcock cross the lobby of the J.W. Marriott at 11:20, forty minutes before the press conference. Blue suit. Dark blue Oilers golf shirt. Eyes fixed straight ahead, already somewhere inside the work.
There was nothing performative about it. He was a man with a purpose, walking toward it.
That image and the one that came later, in the quiet of Rogers Place, have been sitting beside each other in my mind ever since.
What Lafleur understood on that bus in 1995 was something that doesn’t simplify with time - that respect and affection are not the same thing, and that we are often asked to extend one without the other. It is not a comfortable idea. But it is an honest one.
The Babcock era in Edmonton starts now, carrying all the weight and all the promise that entails.
As for what happened when he stopped, and stayed, and told me plainly that he would try harder next time - I’ll be carrying that one for a while.
Are the Edmonton Oilers headed in the right direction?
You tell me.
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