The Cult of Hockey's "Babcock's finest hour and Formenton's return to NHL" podcast

in one basket.

Let's do this.

The Cult of Hockey podcast by the fateful and for the fateful.

I'm David Staples of the Edmonton Journal and I'm here today with Kurt Levins.

Welcome, Kurt.

Hello, David.

Good to see you again.

We're getting busy.

Hockey season all of a sudden feels like it's upon us.

Yeah, it was an interesting month of August.

There wasn't a ton to write about.

So, you know, I had to get a little inventive.

Talked about a lot of other

things.

Yeah.

And then we did our series, of course, on Bowman, which we'll probably...

Excuse me, on Ken Holland.

And we'll finish that up as well.

But not tonight.

Tonight, there's enough breaking news and interesting news that we'll just talk about that, Kurt.

So the agenda is Mike Babcock gave... by far his best interview since becoming Oilers coach.

I mean, he hasn't given a lot, but he came off better, like as a more sensible choice based on what he said in a media interview in this interview.

Like it was a, it was an order of magnitude better than his first interview.

It was, he, he really came off like someone who, um, is experienced, knows how to get this done, and has a process to get this done, and is humble enough to keep learning.

So we'll talk about that.

We'll talk about Leon Dreisaitl's comments about Babcock, Ike Howard's interview today on Oilers Now.

Very interesting.

The captain skates.

Some of the lines we're seeing, some of what's coming out of that.

And finally, we'll talk about the Oilers' new signing, Alex Formanton.

We'll talk about him in two ways.

We'll start out by talking about him as a player.

Then we'll talk about him as a public figure and as a acquitted at trial, someone charged with a sex offense.

Kurt, I guess I'll just go over some of the key points of the Babcock interview first in case people haven't heard it.