Breaking: Ken Hitchcock may be running out of time in Edmonton.

The Edmonton Oilers are an absolute mess right now and it sounds like things may be about to get worse. 

As our readers will already know the Oilers have already made some drastic changes to their organization during the course of the 2018 - 2019 National Hockey League regular season. The carnage began when the Oilers fired highly respected head coach Todd McLellan and after that proved to be an entirely unsuccessful venture they moved up the chain of command and terminated much maligned general manager Peter Chiarelli. 

The major changes resulted in one positive move however when the Oilers announced that they had talked veteran head coach Ken Hitchcock out of retirement. Now I for one did not believe that the acquisition of Hitchcock would result in a complete turn around for the Oilers but I did view it as a good move, and based on my recollection there did not seem to be very much criticism at all of the move at the time. 

Initially it looked like adding Hitchock had really provided a major boost to the team when they rattled off some wins after he was first installed as head coach, but it was not long before the Oilers would return back to their old ways. Although initially Hitchcock handled the failures from his team pretty well, as time has gone on it has become increasingly clear that the experienced head coach has no tolerance for the lack of effort he has witnessed from his locker room.

As a result of the disdain regarding the effort from his team Hitchcock has begun to openly call out his locker room publicly and, allegedly, privately as well and it seems that not everyone in the Oilers organization is a fan of that. You can certainly argue that this is a team in need of some seriously tough love but the Oilers upper brass apparently does not agree. 

On Saturday night during the weekly headlines segment on Hockey Night in Canada, Sportsnet National Hockey League insider Nick Kypreos revealed that Hitchcock has already been asked to be more positive both in front of the cameras and behind closed doors. In fact Kypreos went so far as to suggest that if Hitchcock refuses to comply with those instructions that assistant coach and former Calgary Flames head coach Glen Gulutzan could take over until the end of this current season.

What a mess.