Yahoo Sports Oilers Head Coach Achieves Impressive Milestone
From a surprise mid-season hiring to NHL history.
Kris Knoblauch will take the bench for the 100th time as an NHL head coach tonight against Florida, just over a year after the Oilers first hired him in November 2023.
Tonight marks Kris Knoblauch’s 100th regular season game as head coach (64-28-7). With a win, he would tie Todd McLellan for 4th-most in his 1st 100 games in NHL history.
I’ll be on @CHED880 with @Bob_Stauffer for a 6:45 MT puck drop. Stuart Skinner starts in net. pic.twitter.com/tTtsjiWRAl— Jack Michaels (@EdmontonJack) December 16, 2024
It's been a meteoric rise for Knoblauch, who the Oilers hired away from the AHL's Hartford Wolf Pack to replace Jay Woodcroft after the team's disastrous start to the 2023-24 season. 99 games later, Knoblauch has enjoyed one of the best starts to a coaching career in NHL history.
He's coached the Oilers to a 64-28-7 record, translating to a 112-point pace over a full season. His .682 points percentage is the second-best in NHL history through a coach's first 99 games. A win tonight would tie him with former Oilers coach Todd McLellan for the fourth-most wins in his first 100 games in NHL history.
McLellan achieved that with the early-2010s San Jose Sharks, while the only hotter starts belong to Mike Keenan's mid-80s Flyers and two coaches in Boston's Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito era in the early 70s.
Knoblauch, of course, knows more than just regular season success. He led the Oilers all the way to game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals in his first year at the helm, falling to the Florida Panthers. It's poetic, then, that his 100th game comes against the very same foe.
Knoblauch's biggest achievement so far is steering the Oilers out of their horrific start in 2023-24, turning them into the league's best team from late November on. He's doing it again this year: his team has rebounded from a slow start to light the league on fire over the past few weeks, with eight wins in their past nine games.
Of course, a hot start doesn't guarantee anything. Jay Woodcroft's Oilers were almost as successful as Knoblauch's, but a 2-9-1 start last season got him fired. The life cycle of an NHL coach is a short one.
But for now, Knoblauch's a long way from having to worry about that. His focus is on winning tonight's game, history or no history.
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