The Oilers opened training camp on September 16 with a petition past 60,000 signatures hanging over Rogers Place and a head coach whose last NHL stop lasted fewer than three months before he resigned under a cloud. That is the real temperature in Edmonton right now. Not the depth chart. Not the penalty kill holes. The franchise just spent the summer stacking two of the loudest character bets in the league on the same roster and dared the building to live with it.
Stan Bowman walked into the media session and did not flinch. “We knew going into it that this was something that wasn’t going to be universally accepted,” he said. “That’s why we spent as much time as we did going through the details and doing our due diligence making sure legally it was the right decision to make.” He is right about the legal part. Ontario Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia acquitted Alex Formenton and the four other former world juniors of sexual assault charges on July 24, 2025. The NHL cleared the group to sign in October 2025. Hockey Canada’s independent appeal board later reinstated Formenton while four of the others stayed suspended. The paper trail is clean enough for a one-year deal at $850,000.
I still cannot shake the feeling that Bowman is treating a courtroom standard like a culture standard.
The Acquittal Opened the Door. It Did Not Close the Argument.
Formenton has not played an NHL game since 2021-22, when he put up 18 goals in 79 games for Ottawa and ate real penalty-kill minutes. He spent seasons in Switzerland, then time away working construction, then signed in Edmonton on September 9. Superfan Mary Loewen launched the Change.org petition the next day, saying she would stop supporting the team while he remains. The signatures climbed past 19,000 by the morning of the 11th and kept going. Protests are planned for the first home game. That is not fringe noise. That is a chunk of the fan base telling the front office the roster move carries a price they are unwilling to pay.
Bowman leaned hard on the different treatment. “We spent a lot of time finding out why was there a different treatment of Alex than there was of the other players,” he said. “There are specific reasons why that was the case, which gave us the willingness to move forward relative to the other players. Hockey Canada was very close to it and had a lot of information that isn’t out there in the public.” He also talked growth. “I’ve had a lot of conversations with Alex. He’s grown a lot in the intervening years from where he was then to where he is now.” Fine. Growth is the currency every second-chance franchise claims. The Oilers have cashed that check before with Evander Kane and Corey Perry. Bowman himself is a walking second-chance story after Chicago. The pattern is the point.
I keep coming back to the window. Connor McDavid is not getting younger. Leon Draisaitl is not getting cheaper. The team just fired Kris Knoblauch after two Stanley Cup Finals and a first-round exit. They hired Mike Babcock on June 23 after the NHL finished its look at his 2023 Columbus tenure and found “no current basis to restrict his employment,” even while the NHLPA called the conduct “very concerning.” Leadership meetings with McDavid, Draisaitl, and Zach Hyman green-lit it. The coach who won a Cup in Detroit in 2008 is now the 19th head coach in franchise history, with DJ Smith as associate. The due diligence language is identical to the Formenton pitch. Two files. Same defense. Same shrug at the backlash.
Bowman Sold Process. Fans Are Buying the Message.
Process is what general managers hide behind when the product feels radioactive. Bowman said people are entitled to their opinions and strong feelings. He is correct. He also said the Oilers have been willing to give people fresh starts. He is correct again. What he will not say out loud is that the franchise just told every parent buying a jersey and every season-ticket holder writing a check that a top-six depth piece and a proven coach matter more than the optics of the 2018 world junior case and the Columbus phone-photo allegations. The court cleared Formenton. The league cleared Babcock. The petition still sits north of 60,000. Those numbers can coexist. Only one of them shows up in the standings.
I watched enough of this franchise’s recent runs to know the margin for moral noise is thinner than Bowman wants to admit. When the power play stalls in April, nobody is quoting the Hockey Canada reinstatement memo. When Babcock’s old reputation for riding players hard collides with a locker room that just lost its coach after Final appearances, the “very concerning” label from the players’ association starts to look like foreshadowing instead of history. The Oilers needed penalty-kill help with Matt Savoie and Mattias Janmark dinged up. They needed a coach with a track record. They got both. They also got a camp that opened under a cloud thick enough to blot out the usual September optimism.
The due diligence will hold up in a press conference. It will not hold up if the building starts booing its own depth forward or if the first losing streak turns the Babcock hire into a referendum. Edmonton bet that winning erases the argument. I am not sure the people who signed that petition are in a mood to forget.
