Babcock has spent the first on-ice sessions of Training Camp this week building the foundation for the Oilers to be a fast-paced team that they hope to solidify over the coming days & preseason games, including line combinations and D pairings.<\/p>\n
All of that will begin to shake out when he stands behind the bench for the first time with the Oilers on Saturday, where the 63-year-old says it’s going to be an adjustment for him as he gets set to take control of an NHL bench for the first time since 2019.<\/p>\n
Babcock says the shorter preseason is a huge positive due to the jam-packed schedule, meaning there are fewer opportunities for players to impress and get their games in order, which raises the competition and commitment levels during Training Camp.<\/p>\n
“If you’re coming back as a coach, you know way more than when you’re new as a coach. Everyone gets a fresh chance,” Babcock said. “I don’t know of a better situation now that camp’s so short. They’ve made it hard, so I’m not going to learn a whole bunch until I’m standing on the pine there tomorrow night.”<\/p>\n
The lineup for Saturday’s game will be made apparent during the morning skate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Babcock has spent the first on-ice sessions of Training Camp this week building the foundation for the Oilers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":897285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-897284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/897285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}