I have the perfect sales pitch to get Connor McDavid to join the Montreal Canadiens!
Here it is: Hey Connor, the Habs have a player-friendly coach who you might like a lot better than Mike Babcock.
Really! With more and more reports surfacing that Babcock will become the new coach of the Edmonton Oilers, fans here have to be feeling better and better that their team is coached by Martin St. Louis. MSL is the anti-Babcock. The Canadiens coach is a former superstar player who is I’d argue better than any other bench boss in the league at motivating his players and he is custom-made for the youngest team in the league, a team full of players with high skill levels.
Canadiens head coach Martin St. Louis congratulates Cole Caufield as Joe Veleno looks on after Caufield scored his 50th goal of the season on April 9, 2026. John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette
Just look what he did with Cole Caufield. The young sniper was stiffing big time under former coach Dominique Ducharme but once St. Louis was hired in February 2022, he took Caufield under his wing and the coach, himself a former scoring star who was far from the tallest player in the league, breathed new life into this diminutive winger and a few of years later, Caufield was scoring 50 goals!
Then, in another coaching universe altogether, you have Babcock. On one hand, he is the ultimate old-school coach and worse, he has done some things in the past that are just downright wrong. In Columbus, he asked players to give him their cellphones so he could check out their personal photos, a completely insane request that ended up getting him fired. With the Toronto Maple Leafs, he asked Mitch Marner to rate his teammates in confidence and then showed his ratings to the other players!
There are reports that the Oilers’ leading players, presumably including McDavid, have signed off on hiring Babcock. But media, social media and hockey insiders have reacted extremely negatively to the news and you have to wonder how this will affect McDavid’s decision to stay or leave Edmonton.
When McDavid re-signed with the Oilers last October, he signed for only two seasons, beginning this coming season, and it was clear to everyone paying attention that he was putting the team on notice that it had to win a championship within two years or he would be gone.
After the Oilers were eliminated in the first round in this year’s playoffs by the Anaheim Ducks, McDavid made no secret of his frustration with the team and its season.
“It sucks obviously, we were just not good enough all year,” McDavid said at the time.
So Strike 1 in the team’s bid to keep its superstar. Then comes the Babcock nuttiness. Maybe, if you want to keep McDavid, get a coach whose hiring doesn’t cause an immediate spit-storm of controversy. But that’s the Oilers for you. The Babcock reports had me wondering on X: “Can the Oilers do anything right? (It’s a rhetorical question.)
I have criticized St. Louis — and nearly been tarred-and-feathered every time I dare this — but there is no doubt he has achieved so much with this young squad. Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes gave St. Louis this much-coveted position even though at the time he had absolutely no professional coaching experience and, so far, the move has paid off.
In fact St. Louis’s success might be inspiring the Canadiens’ archrivals, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Sportsnet insider Elliotte Friedman reported that he was hearing that the Leafs might be planning on interviewing former star player Joe Pavelski for the Leafs head coach position. He also has no pro coaching experience and Friedman quoted one source as calling Pavelski “a Martin St. Louis-type candidate.”
The best thing St. Louis has done in Montreal is inspire his players. These guys, to a last man, would go through a brick wall for their coach. And that kind of motivation counts big time. Just remember that the last time the Canadiens won the Cup, all those years ago in 1993, the coach was Jacques Demers and his primary talent was the same as St. Louis’s — inspiring the troops.
The crazy thing is St. Louis still seems to many of us like a new kid on the block, but he is actually one of the National Hockey League’s most senior coaches. He is the NHL coach with the fourth longest tenure with the same team.
Look, he isn’t perfect. I still contend that he could’ve done a lot more in that Eastern Conference Final series against the Carolina Hurricanes. Games 2 through 5, all lost by the Canadiens, were like repeat broadcasts. Every game was exactly the same. The Habs were hemmed in in their own zone by the Canes’ aggressive forecheck and couldn’t get any shots. So do something, anything, different. Bring in different players. Switch all the lines. Change your defensive system. Even if you still lose, you lose trying.
The fact is that St. Louis has room to improve as an in-game tactician.
But the big picture of this season is the Canadiens made it to the final four teams in the playoffs, three wins away from making the Stanley Cup final. Precisely no one thought that would happen. They finished fourth in the Eastern Conference. It was an amazing season by any definition and if management makes the right moves this summer, next season should rock too.
Bottom line is that St. Louis is like the team. He can become an elite coach, but neither he nor the team is quite there yet.
An earlier version of this story stated that the Edmonton Oilers lost to the Vegas Golden Knights in the first round of this year’s playoffs. The Gazette regrets the error.