A major Stanley Cup-winning name could soon arrive behind the Oilers' bench
Darren Dreger dropped a name into the coaching market Wednesday night, and it's one that puts Stan Bowman and the Edmonton Oilers right in the middle of it.
The TSN insider posted on X that Peter Laviolette could be a fit somewhere, ruling out Toronto, naming Edmonton and questioning Los Angeles.
Probably not the Maple Leafs. Maybe the Oilers. What about the Kings?
That's the kind of casual sourcing that usually means a conversation is already happening behind the scenes.
Here's the post that lit up hockey Twitter late Wednesday.
The clip shows Dreger's text post stamped 11 PM, already pulling thousands of views inside an hour.
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And the timing makes sense if you look at how Edmonton's spring ended.
The Oilers went out in six to the Anaheim Ducks in Round 1, dropping the series 4-2 after taking Game 1 at home.
Why the Kings angle is the strangest part of Dreger's report
Los Angeles is the curveball. D.J. Smith was hired on March 1, and the Kings still got swept in four by Colorado.
That's a 90-point season, a -22 goal differential, and a first-round exit that lasted less than a week.
Ken Holland inherited that mess last May. If he's already shopping behind a coach he hasn't even given a full training camp, that's a story on its own.
Edmonton's case writes itself differently. Connor McDavid put up 138 points in the regular season and went -8 across six playoff games against the Ducks.
The goaltending finished the job. Tristan Jarry sat at an .882 save percentage in 33 starts. Connor Ingram wasn't much better at .898.
You don't fix that with a new voice behind the bench. But the bench is always the first thing teams change when a roster like Edmonton's can't get out of the first round.
Laviolette's last stop was the New York Rangers. He's a Stanley Cup winner, he's been fired plenty, and he's exactly the kind of name a GM floats when he wants the room to feel the heat.
The question now is whether Bowman actually pulls the trigger, or whether this is Dreger reading smoke that never turns into fire.
Either way, the Oilers can't run it back the same way. Not after losing to Anaheim. Not with McDavid one summer closer to a decision nobody in Alberta wants to think about.
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YESTERDAY
MAY 20, 2026
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| G | A | PTS | ||
| Dylan Coghlan | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Pavel Dorofeyev | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Nic Dowd | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Brett Howden | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Gabriel Landeskog | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Valeri Nichushkin | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Rasmus Andersson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ross Colton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Eichel | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Tomas Hertl | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ben Hutton | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Nathan MacKinnon | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Mitch Marner | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Brandon Saad | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Colton Sissons | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Devon Toews | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Jack Ahcan | - | - | - | |
| Ivan Barbashev | - | - | - | |
| Brent Burns | - | - | - | |
| Jack Drury | - | - | - | |
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