Head Coach Mike Babcock, who\u2019s only had the pleasure of coaching McDavid for a few months now, there\u2019s an even greater sense of appreciation for No. 97 in his assessment just from seeing firsthand how driven he is to push the boundaries for himself & his teammates.<\/p>\n
Having coached the likes of Nicklas Lidstrom, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg during his time with the Detroit Red Wings, Babcock knows just how important leaders are in lifting a locker room, and McDavid exemplifies that every day with the Oilers.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, when you come here and you see the work ethic every day, the commitment to being really good, it’s like a lot of the superstars \u2013\u00a0they got a drive that\u2019s second to none,\u201d Babcock said. \u201cHe’s a proud guy who’s a really good teammate, and is pushing the guys by example every day.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe wants to have success, and so we’re trying to help him with that process.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Oilers will try to begin the season with a point streak of at least six games for the third time in franchise history, having last done so during the 1984-85 season (12-0-3-0) and having four instances of starting with points in five straight.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the Kings will try to avoid going winless in their first five games, something they haven’t done since 1997-98, after having only four games in the opening 15 days of the 2026-27 regular season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Head Coach Mike Babcock, who\u2019s only had the pleasure of coaching McDavid for a few months now, there\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":930907,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":["post-930906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edmonton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=930906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/930906\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/930907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=930906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=930906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=930906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}