The Edmonton Oilers named defenceman Evan Bouchard and forward Zach Hyman alternate captains on Thursday, completing a leadership group reshaped by the off-season departure of Darnell Nurse.
Bouchard and Hyman join captain Connor McDavid and fellow alternates Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, the club announced on its official website. Nurse spent 11 years with the Oilers and wore an alternate captain’s ‘A’ for seven seasons before leaving the organization, and his exit left the only opening in an Edmonton leadership core that has been among the league’s most stable.
The announcement landed as Edmonton worked through the opening days of main training camp, and 12 days ahead of a regular-season opener against the Vancouver Canucks on Sept. 29.
Hyman, 34, enters his sixth season with the Oilers and had gone without a letter on his jersey until Thursday. He signed a five-year contract worth US$38.5 million, an average annual value of US$5.5 million, on July 1, 2021. The club describes him as an unsung leader in the dressing room whose value has been as much about work rate as production.
The numbers behind the promotion are substantial. Hyman scored 54 goals in 2022-23 and has topped 70 points twice in five seasons in Edmonton. An injury-affected 2025-26 campaign limited him to 58 games, in which he recorded 53 points, including 31 goals.
Bouchard, 26, arrives at the role from a different direction. The Oakville, Ont., product was Edmonton’s first-round pick, 10th overall, in 2018, and spent parts of two seasons with the American Hockey League’s Bakersfield Condors before establishing himself in the NHL in 2021. He put up 95 points, including 21 goals, in all 82 games last season.
Bouchard’s playoff production is the more striking figure. According to the Oilers, his 1.09 points per game in the post-season ranks second all-time among NHL defencemen, behind only Bobby Orr at 1.24.
The leadership announcement is one piece of a broader reset in Edmonton. Mike Babcock is running his first camp as the club’s head coach, working alongside associate coach D.J. Smith, assistant coach Paul McFarland, goaltending coach Peter Aubry and skills coach Conor Allen, according to the team’s release.
Babcock told reporters after Thursday’s first two on-ice sessions that he intends to open the season with McDavid and Draisaitl on the same line, a question that has occupied every Oilers coach for more than a decade. The rest, he said, he will sort out as camp unfolds.
“I’m going to try and start with the two of them together, for sure,” Babcock said, in comments reported by NHL.com. “The third piece on each of those top three lines, I don’t know that. And I also don’t know just on health.”
Babcock said his first priority was establishing how the team will play without the puck, and that every forward will need a defined role. He had not run an NHL practice since Toronto fired him 23 games into the 2019-20 season. The 63-year-old has 700 regular-season wins, 12th in league history, across 17 seasons with Anaheim, Detroit and Toronto, won the Stanley Cup with the Red Wings in 2008 and coached Canada to Olympic gold in 2010 and 2014.
Draisaitl, who has said he wants more consistency in the forward combinations, described the opening session as intense.
“He’s energetic. He wants things done a certain way and he wants them done right,” Draisaitl told reporters. “He cares about the little things, so it was a good first day.”
Edmonton opened camp with 56 players in attendance, 31 forwards, 17 defencemen and eight goaltenders, competing for roster spots. The club’s four-game pre-season slate opens at Rogers Place against the Winnipeg Jets, with road dates against the Jets and Canucks to follow and a home finale against the Calgary Flames on Sept. 26.
The Oilers open the 2026-27 regular season with a home-and-home against Vancouver, starting Sept. 29 at Rogers Place and continuing Oct. 1 in Vancouver. Edmonton has not won the Stanley Cup since 1990.
Featured photo: Brian Murphy / All-Pro Reels, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. The image is from a Feb. 2, 2022 game in Washington and does not depict this week’s training camp.
