If you were hoping to see the Canucks buy a draft pick by signing big centre Michael McCarron in free agency, keep hoping.

On Tuesday morning, news broke that the Minnesota Wild had re-signed the hulking right-shot centre to a six-year deal worth $3.33 million annually. The Wild acquired McCarron, who turned 31 in March, from the Nashville Predators in exchange for a second-round pick ahead of this year’s trade deadline. McCarron appeared in 11 playoff games for the Wild, tallying two goals and two assists.

That rising NHL salary cap is… something.

On Monday, news broke via TSN’s Darren Dreger that the Edmonton Oilers were consulting with the NHL Players Association to determine if there are objections that must be resolved before potentially hiring Mike Babcock.

Because any time you have the chance to hire a coach that the NHLPA might object to, you just have to do it.

Most recently, Babcock resigned from his post as Columbus Blue Jackets head coach before ever coaching a game. This was due to a story leaking that Babcock was unexpectedly asking players to go through their phone camera rolls with him. While that might not seem all that nefarious, it quickly set off alarm bells for those that haven’t forgotten the previous stories about Babcock’s power tripping mind games, which have been called out by multiple former players.

In 2019, former Red Wings Chris Chelios and Johan Franzen accused Babcock of “verbal assault.”

“Some of the things [Babcock said to Franzen] on the bench, I don’t know what he said to him behind closed doors one-on-one, but he blatantly verbally assaulted him during the game on the bench,” Chelios told the Spittin’ Chiclets Podcast.

In a Swedish interview, Franzen called Babcock the worst person he’s ever met.

“He’s a terrible person, the worst I have ever met. He’s a bully who was attacking people. It could be a cleaner at the arena in Detroit or anybody. He would lay into people without any reason,” Franzen said.

Multiple NHL veterans who played for Babcock, including Chelios and Mike Commodore, have shed light on Babcock’s treatment of Mike Modano. In 2010-11, Modano spent the final year of his NHL career with Babcock’s Detroit Red Wings, which was also the team Modano, a Michigan native, grew up rooting for. Babcock elected to make Modano a healthy scratch with 1,499 career games played, preventing the forward from reaching the prestigious 1,500-game milestone.

“What he did to [Mike] Modano was incredibly disrespectful,” Chelios said. “What he did to, just recently, [Jason] Spezza in Toronto, those were the things that are so unnecessary.”

The Spezza incident Chelios was referring to was back in 2019-20, when, in his first season with the Leafs, Spezza was made a healthy scratch for the home opener in his hometown of Toronto against the Ottawa Senators. Spezza, of course, had spent the previous 18 years of his career with the Senators after being selected second overall in the 2001 NHL Draft.

And who could forget classics such as asking a rookie Mitch Marner to rank his Toronto Maple Leafs teammates by hardest to least hardest worker, then sharing that list with the team, without indicating to Marner beforehand that that’s what would be happening?

The reaction out of Edmonton has been swift, and as you’d expect, mostly negative. My colleague over at OilersNation.com, Jason Gregor, wrote a tremendous column headlined Why are the Oilers even considering Mike Babcock?