Breaking: Craig MacTavish fired in KHL after just eight games

This just in, former Edmonton Oilers head coach and long-time NHLer Craig MacTavish has been relieved of his head coaching duties with KHL club Lokomotiv Yaroslavl after just eight games.

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MacTavish went 3-5 in just eight games as the team’s head coach after being signed to a two year contract just this past May. Suffice it to say that things clearly weren’t working out between the head coach and the team, after all eight games hardly seems like an audition. Still, the team’s management must have seen enough in that brief period to know that MacTavish just wasn’t the right fit.

To be fair to MacTavish though, coaches in the KHL don’t quite have the same job security that they have in North American leagues like the NHL and AHL. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a team to use several head coaches throughout a KHL season. For whatever reason, coaches just don’t seem to have much of a shelf life in Russian hockey.

What’s next for MacTavish is anyone’s guess at this point. He was, obviously, a longtime member of the Oilers organization but at this point it seems like a reunion between the two is unlikely. To a lot of Oilers fans MacTavish represents the “Old Boys Club” of Oilers past glory. The team spent a great deal of time and energy this past offseason trying to distance themselves from their past successes and failures going so far as to hire Ken Holland and Dave Tippet, two experienced and successful individuals who came to prominence with competing clubs not within the Oilers organization.