Mike Babcock has a winner in front of him, wiping the slate clean for once-ostracized coach

It took Mike Babcock four months to thaw out after most of a decade in the cold.

In June, Babcock was the Oilers’ impossible-to-explain choice to salvage Connor McDavid’s career in Edmonton. In terms of personality matching, this move didn’t make any sense. On the one hand, you had the softest spoken man in pro sports. On the other, you had Saskatoon Machiavelli.

What were they going to talk about? How would Babcock run mind games on someone who could snuff out whatever remained of his reputation with an offhand comment? Which of the two would play in net?

The brilliance here was in the summer hire. Outrage requires news oxygen. With everybody up at the cottage, the initial level of dudgeon was unsustainable. By the time Babcock and the Oilers showed up, everybody was tired of being scandalized.

Then the Oilers stars started making weird connections between Babcock and masculinity.

“He doesn’t shy away from telling you straight to your face. He’s a real man about it,” Leon Draisaitl said. “We’re all men in here.”

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Are you talking to us or yourself or what? I guess the problem was simple – testosterone. Get it into a gaseous state, get it airborne and pump it in through the vents.

Disaster Watch was back on. You could see it coming. Then it started.

The Oilers don’t look good. Many nights, they look overwhelming. It’s mostly the top line, but what a line. Those five main guys are coming at you like a Hokusai print – The Great Wave Over the Ice District.

McDavid in particular has accessed his inner Mario Lemieux. He isn’t just scoring at a 252-point pace. He’s making everyone else in the league look like they’re playing with canes instead of sticks.

Seven years after his fall, Babcock does not appear chastened, but his sharpest edges have been sanded back. In the early days with the Leafs – possibly the height of his influence – Babcock had a tendency to slip into a storytelling/lecture style. He wasn’t there to coach. He was there to teach. And not just the players. Everyone.

Even when Babcock put his lamps on you glancingly, via press conference, you could feel his allure. If hockey can be said to have cults, Babcock ran one.

Babcock no longer speaks in an oracular manner. There are fewer digressions and less smirking. He’s too tough a type to beg forgiveness, but it’s evident in his new approach. I don’t know if he’s the same guy or not, but he wants you to see that he isn’t.

And absolutely none of that would matter if the Oilers hadn’t come barrel-rolling out of the start. But they have, so all is forgiven.

That’s all it takes in sports. You were a loser who acted strangely, so everyone decided at once to hate you. But now you’re winning again and haven’t done anything obviously bizarre, so you’re a genius again. Welcome back, sensei.

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From this point on, best intentions will be read onto everything Babcock does. As long as he doesn’t stop mid-briefing and demand everyone hold up their phones and show him pictures of their girlfriends, people will assume he has a plan.

On Saturday, the Oilers had their doors blown off by the Leafs. How bad a night was it? McDavid had only two points. That’s a 168-point pace – a 33-per-cent production falloff. Maybe he should go on injured reserve.

The team looked crap, but it still put Babcock in position to score. Afterward, old Babcock would have gotten that beady eyed look that told you someone was going to be waking up to the most horrible text chain of their lives. New Babcock blamed himself.

“[Leafs coach] Jim Hiller had his group playing harder than I had my group playing, so that’s on me.”

You see what he did there, right? “It’s my fault that it’s their fault.” So it’s not really your fault. Even when he’s playing it soft, Babcock can’t help himself.

The difference is that things are clicking again. Everybody loves his tell-it-straight style again, even when it’s crooked. Maybe Babcock didn’t change. Maybe in the space between 2019 and now, the world changed around him.

What could never be said about Babcock’s approach – the humiliations, the passive-aggression, the loyalty tests – was that it worked. It still works. Maybe not in every professional environment, but it does in hockey.

Babcock didn’t fail in Toronto because he became bad at coaching. He failed because he had the wrong personnel for his style, and couldn’t adapt. Who asks the most ruthless leader in the game to run a school for gifted children?

In the end, Babcock wasn’t running the Leafs. He was fighting to change them into something they weren’t ready to be.

In Edmonton, he has something closer to what he had in Detroit. Not in terms of aggregate talent. The Oilers are much more top heavy. But they are like those great Red Wings teams in that they are veteran, and they are desperate. From McDavid down, they can all see their promise coming to nothing.

It should have been obvious that this was a good match. These Oilers will do now what those Red Wings did then – put up with just about anything if it results in a championship, and worry about whether it was good for their psyches later.

The irony here is that Babcock probably would have been a good choice for the Leafs, had he taken the job now.

At the time he was hired in Toronto, someone told me that he saw himself on the opening montage of Hockey Night in Canada. He felt he could guarantee that by taking the Leafs to a Cup.

That montage no longer exists, but the challenge does. Ten years ago, Babcock was the greatest coach in the game. Five years ago, he was finished. A year from now, if things turn out exactly right, he’ll be back where he started.