As bad as it can get in Edmonton

[Buffalo Rick]

I just watched Marty Biron's take on the Edmonton Oilers and he says this is not likely to be fixed overnight.  Having arguably the best two players in the NHL as he said, the rest of them are non existent.  Who saw this coming? Sure, maybe you can kick my Sabres around some, but not this much

[JR Ewing]

2 hours ago, Buffalo Rick said:

I just watched Marty Biron's take on the Edmonton Oilers and he says this is not likely to be fixed overnight.  Having arguably the best two players in the NHL as he said, the rest of them are non existent.  Who saw this coming? Sure, maybe you can kick my Sabres around some, but not this much

 

-I don’t know how Martin Biron can go on TSN and say that the Oilers suck this year because it remains a 2-person team. He's just plain incorrect, and there's certain Easterm media you  should almost never listen to talk about western teams, and he's one of them. As it turns out, McDavid and Draisaitl have been materially responsible for the suck as much as anyone. This has been the worst 12 games of both their careers.

 

-Save a miracle, it’s over. Connor McDavid is hurt. He came back too soon.

 

-Mattias Ekholm suffered a training injury and isn’t the player we saw last spring. The hard work of backchecking and having your head on a swivel has been abandoned for hundreds of ‘also in photo’ moments across 200 feet of ice and heartbreak.

 

-Ken Holland has drained the prospect pool, signed myriad men to long-term deals, sunk his battleship and spilled the wine. The chessboard mocks him this morning. The only move he has left is to fire the coach. Daryl Katz or Jeff Jackson could step in and fire Holland instead, but the reality of the situation is that it won't happen.

 

-Jay Woodcroft will need to go. Every coach has strengths and weaknesses, but the series against Vegas seems to have broken him. Instead of playing to his team's strengths, he completely changed their structure from a man-to-man and to a zone defense. The fastest team in hockey now spends a lot of its time standing around, which then kills their transition game, which was their great strength. The team usually plays an 11 forward/7 D roster, dressing three centres. The defensive structure requires the centres to skate back *very* hard, and with two of those centres playing upwards of 25 minutes per night, their ability to get back is nearly gone half-way through the game. The depth players get on the ice for about 7 minutes a night, and are cold as ice when they finally get out there. The new system has failed, but he isn't budging from it. Play to your strengths.

 

-Due to this, the opposition's plan is so obvious that Mr. Magoo could see it: play risk-free rope-a-dope hockey until the game is half over, and McDavid/Draisaitl are gassed, and then pour it on. Watch the free man get shot after shot from the home plate area that the exhausted centres can't get back to cover.

 

-Ken Holland and Zach Hyman's great blunder was to sign that Jack Campbell contract. For anybody saying "Hyman?" he was front and centre with this during the off-season with move, and Holland repeatedly referred to Hyman's enthusiastic review of him as a human being. My understanding is that he's well liked by teammates. I'm here to say that I don't care; that you don't have to be friends with all of your teammates. It's better to win with guys you don't want to have a beer with than it is to lose with your buddies.

 

-Elite talent may very well be heading out of the city, leaving old men with big paychecks to wander and wither.

 

-Peter Chiarelli crippled the team with the Lucic signing and the trades of Hall and Reinhart, and the club never really recovered. He made sure to give term deals to players like Kris Russell and Zack Kassian while continually bridging Darnell Nurse, who had huge leverage over the team for his UFA deal, resulting in him being overpaid by about $3M. Disgusted by the softness of Jordan Eberle, Chia traded him for Ryan Strome, whom he then traded for the softest player I've seen in my life: Ryan Spooner. He then traded him to reacquire Sam Gagner. So, he turned Jordan Eberle and Sam Gagner into Sam Gagner. Let that speak for the shrewdness of his horse trading abilities.

 

-When it was time for ChiaPete to go, they needed a General Manager with a vision of the modern game and a deep understanding of the cap, and instead turned to Ken Holland, who was probably getting his AARP card in the mail right around the time Edmonton gave him a job offer. He badly whiffed in his effort to get a goalie, and has mostly made sure to bring in a lot of nice guys. The Oilers have one of the biggest (and strangely) softest teams in the NHL, the only p!sscutter being Evander Kane.

 

-So here we are. Last night, the Oilers played what have been the most tentative game I've seen from them ever, including the Dallas Eakins years, when he assigned four zone defenses that would be changed up on the fly. The players are constantly second-guessing themselves, hesitating and playing incredibly slow hockey, and literally every player is going about as bad as they can. Players and coaches talk about how, when they're playing well, they're loose... Well, right now, the Oilers are tighter than a camel's a$$ in a sandstorm.

 

-Connor McDavid is one of the very greatest players in this sport's history, and in his prime right now... And there are 30 teams with a better record. What a waste.

 

-Forgive any spelling or grammatical errors. I'm not even slightly in the mood to edit this before posting.

 

[Math]

@JR Ewing Great read, insights and explanantions. I heard the same elements about the Flames woes as well. TVA's Maxim Lapierre suggested it was a waste that a guy like Corey Perry ended up in Chicago while he could have helped a top tier team like Edmonton. I used to hate Perry, then was a bit forced to put water in my wine when he signed with the Stars but I must admit that I'm starting to like what he brought to the teams he joined (and it costs me a lot to acknowledge that). Reached the final with the Stars, then with Montréal and again with Tampa... Seems that he has some sort of leadership that manages to federate a team together.

 

In your opinion, do you think a Corey Perry would have benefited the Oilers in that sense ?

[pilldoc]

47 minutes ago, JR Ewing said:

-Ken Holland and Zach Hyman's great blunder was to sign that Jack Campbell contract.

 

this a 1000x over.  The biggest flaw Oilers management has done over the past few years is not addressing the goalie situation properly.

[JR Ewing]

2 hours ago, Math said:

@JR Ewing Great read, insights and explanantions. I heard the same elements about the Flames woes as well. TVA's Maxim Lapierre suggested it was a waste that a guy like Corey Perry ended up in Chicago while he could have helped a top tier team like Edmonton. I used to hate Perry, then was a bit forced to put water in my wine when he signed with the Stars but I must admit that I'm starting to like what he brought to the teams he joined (and it costs me a lot to acknowledge that). Reached the final with the Stars, then with Montréal and again with Tampa... Seems that he has some sort of leadership that manages to federate a team together.

 

I like to read the numbers because it gives me an understanding of what happened when I can’t watch. It surrounds the players upside and downside in some informative ways.

 

But for me, hockey really boils down to one-on-one battles when it comes time for serious hockey. Not the hockey you see in January between a top 4 team and one out of the playoffs but between evenly matched skill. Some refer to it as Darryl Sutter hockey, and I guess that's right. I don’t really like him much as a head coach because he makes his teams play that way every minute for the entire season, so they're gassed come playoffs – but I ramble.

 

When I watch dmen in their own end, I watch who comes out of the corners with the puck, along the boards which winger gets the puck out over the line when they have the chance. Who ties up the guys stick in the slot. Things like that. I love watching the beautiful plays, of course, because the skill makes watching the game fun & exciting. But the trenches are, for me, where games are won and lost once the skill becomes neutralized and the cap is the ultimate levelling tool.

 

For all that people go on about his skill, and rightly so, it's the battles where Connor McDavid actually shines, and he comes away with pucks all the time. Ryan Smyth, badly outweighed and out-skilled his entire career, did the same thing. I can count the puck battles he lost on my hands. Corey Perry wins a huge number of puck battles and is awful to play against. Patty Maroon. Those sorts of guys. There is almost none of that in the entire bottom half of the Oilers forward group, and in the top half, it's basically McDavid, Hyman and Draisaitl. Their blueline? Ekholm is that sort. Despite some hockey IQ issues, Darnell Nurse is that sort.

 

An issue with the zone defense is that it requires players who have strong defensive awareness, and I don't think this group is very strong in that. They have the speed and skating ability to stick with players, but not the IQ to do it in a zone, RNH (who is a smart player) aside. When you see Oilers highlights, watch the GA. Watch how often they skate hard to come back and then stop moving their feet just as they catch up to the offensive players, but stop short of getting on the defensive side of the puck. Over and over again, plays that a lot of PeeWee play have pat, a lot of them can't get drilled into them.

 

Time-stamped examples:

 

Holloway stops moving his feet:

 

Bouchard stops moving his feet:

 

McDavid stops moving his feet:

 

 

You get the idea, and late in games, with McDavid and Draisaitl it's understandable because the coach has given them too many minutes. The roster is decimated due to the cap, so it's not like Woodcroft can even afford to bench anybody and hold them accountable. It's galling to watch.

 

2 hours ago, Math said:

In your opinion, do you think a Corey Perry would have benefited the Oilers in that sense ?

 

Would Corey Perry help their depth. Yes, he would help. They could send out six clones of Guy Carbonneau and Craig Ramsay, but those goalies have still been playing some miserable hockey.

 

Edited November 10, 2023 by JR Ewing

[JR Ewing]

1 hour ago, pilldoc said:

 

this a 1000x over.  The biggest flaw Oilers management has done over the past few years is not addressing the goalie situation properly.

 

When the Oilers signed Campbell, I was so mad that I couldn't even post it. I'm serious. Go look. Nothing. I was miserable. The term and the price were inexcusable, and I can't believe for a single second that any other NHL team was approaching Jack Campbell with $25M. Good for him. Bad for the team.

 

The thing with goalies is that any weakness whatsoever can be either a serious limiting factor or a career-ender, and I am not sure it is fully appreciated how much video has amplified that. As a forward you can have a muffin shot or be a lazy back checker or not be very good along the boards, etc, and still have some kind of career if you have a really strong skill such as a great shot or plus skater. There is a top six and a bottom six – or a middle six these days – for different strengths and weaknesses. For defensemen, it is just standard to split them into two way, offensive or defensive types recognizing that only one of those three groups has no huge deficiencies. You can have a long and good career in the NHL and make a lot of money with any of those designations.

 

You don’t really get that with goalies.

 

You sometimes hear them referred to as reflex or positional but once the talk turns to weaknesses you know their career is in jeopardy. When the video coach tells you to "shoot high, glove hand" or "he can’t close the five hole" gets mentioned, and the goals start going in, the NHL jobs disappear in a hurry.

 

Goalies are elite when they have exceptional ability, are NHL employable when they “stop the ones they should” – or close to it for backups – and reassessing their career choices once an obvious weakness that coaching cannot fix is identified. For about the last 25 years, I've grouped goalies this way:

 

JR's Tiers of Goalies

Elite - routinely stops sure goals, buy a lotto ticket if he allows a bad goal. 40+ quality starts per year

Strong - stops sure goals, rarely allows bad goals. 30-39 quality starts per year

Solid - sometimes stops sure goals, sometimes allows bad goals. 20-29 quality starts per year

Unreliable: rarely stops sure goals, often allows bad goals. 10-19 quality starts per year

Replacement: doesn't stop sure goals, routinely allows bad goals. 0-9 quality starts per year

 

-I always used that explanation for them and then amended it when Quality Starts came around a number of years ago...

 

I am/was pretty sure about Skinner, and came into this year seeing him in the Solid tier and could perhaps grow into becoming at the bottom end of the Strong tier. He should have a decent career in the NHL in some capacity.

 

Campbell is different. He's been Strong in the past but completely lost it during his time in Toronto. He fell to Unreliable last year and down to Replacement this season, which is why he's now being paid $5M to ride the buses in the American League. He fits into the one odd category that is used to talk about goalies – the head case or mental category and I don’t use them as necessarily pejorative terms.

 

Robin Lehner is/was the poster boy for this, though Campbell seems to be more on the "confidence" side of things. You hear the confidence thing about goal scorers as well, but a goal scorer that goes 8 games without a goal is probably still playing somewhere in the line up. Goalies who lose you 8 games in a row because of bad goals? Not so much.

 

So to end this long ramble, the thing I look for in goalies isn’t so much what they're good at, but what they're bad at.

 

That alone removes a lot of the voodoo.

 

 

[pilldoc]

14 minutes ago, JR Ewing said:

When the Oilers signed Campbell, I was so mad that I couldn't even post it. I'm serious. Go look. Nothing. I was miserable. The term and the price were inexcusable, and I can't believe for a single second that any other NHL team was approaching Jack Campbell with $25M. Good for him. Bad for the team.

 

I totallyu rememember .....,  I think we all were stunned and you were absolutely livid.   Many of us I believe all knew this was not going to end well.

 

16 minutes ago, JR Ewing said:

JR's Tiers of Goalies

Elite - routinely stops sure goals, buy a lotto ticket if he allows a bad goal. 40+ quality starts per year

Strong - stops sure goals, rarely allows bad goals. 30-39 quality starts per year

Solid - sometimes stops sure goals, sometimes allows bad goals. 20-29 quality starts per year

Unreliable: rarely stops sure goals, often allows bad goals. 10-19 quality starts per year

Replacement: doesn't stop sure goals, routinely allows bad goals. 0-9 quality starts per year

 

-I always used that explanation for them and then amended it when Quality Starts came around a number of years ago...

 

I am/was pretty sure about Skinner, and came into this year seeing him in the Solid tier and could perhaps grow into becoming at the bottom end of the Strong tier. He should have a decent career in the NHL in some capacity.

 

Campbell is different. He's been Strong in the past but completely lost it during his time in Toronto. He fell to Unreliable last year and down to Replacement this season, which is why he's now being paid $5M to ride the buses in the American League. He fits into the one odd category that is used to talk about goalies – the head case or mental category and I don’t use them as necessarily pejorative terms.

 

Robin Lehner is/was the poster boy for this, though Campbell seems to be more on the "confidence" side of things. You hear the confidence thing about goal scorers as well, but a goal scorer that goes 8 games without a goal is probably still playing somewhere in the line up. Goalies who lose you 8 games in a row because of bad goals? Not so much.

 

yup ... pretty much feel the same way .....

 

I use Dobber's Goalie Ranking System:

 

Tier 0:  The only goalies who are completely safe owns, and elite owns. They’ll give you plenty of wins, fewer losses, and good peripheral stats. They generally don’t get hurt, and are fairly consistent. Yes, this Tier is a small one.

 

Tier 1:  Good goaltenders who are the clear starters for their team. They are generally going to be safe picks, they should give you solid stats, and each one has upside for greatness in the coming seasons.

 

Tier 2:  Either clear-cut number one goalies, but on weaker teams. Or they are in a shared situation right now, but with tremendous upside in the future. Or they are on top teams but have a shaky track record of late. There is some risk here but also some upside.

(Skinner)

 

Tier 3:  A mix of 1B goalies with upside, fading veterans, or top prospects who are very close to making the jump.

 

Tier 4:  The starting goalies on terrible teams, backup goalies on great teams, some very good prospects who are getting closer – and everything in between. With the right bounces, some of these goalies may become stars. Some will see their last career NHL game this season. Lots of risk here.  (Campbell)

 

Tier 5: All the rest.  Bad goalies and backups

 

Tier 6: Prospects

 

So yeahj ... I totally get your POV when it comes to Goalie Rankins and Tiers .......

[Math]

29 minutes ago, pilldoc said:

 

I totallyu rememember .....,  I think we all were stunned and you were absolutely livid.   Many of us I believe all knew this was not going to end well.

 

 

yup ... pretty much feel the same way .....

 

I use Dobber's Goalie Ranking System:

 

Tier 0:  The only goalies who are completely safe owns, and elite owns. They’ll give you plenty of wins, fewer losses, and good peripheral stats. They generally don’t get hurt, and are fairly consistent. Yes, this Tier is a small one.

 

Tier 1:  Good goaltenders who are the clear starters for their team. They are generally going to be safe picks, they should give you solid stats, and each one has upside for greatness in the coming seasons.

 

Tier 2:  Either clear-cut number one goalies, but on weaker teams. Or they are in a shared situation right now, but with tremendous upside in the future. Or they are on top teams but have a shaky track record of late. There is some risk here but also some upside.

(Skinner)

 

Tier 3:  A mix of 1B goalies with upside, fading veterans, or top prospects who are very close to making the jump.

 

Tier 4:  The starting goalies on terrible teams, backup goalies on great teams, some very good prospects who are getting closer – and everything in between. With the right bounces, some of these goalies may become stars. Some will see their last career NHL game this season. Lots of risk here.  (Campbell)

 

Tier 5: All the rest.  Bad goalies and backups

 

Tier 6: Prospects

 

So yeahj ... I totally get your POV when it comes to Goalie Rankins and Tiers .......

 

Tier 7: Kari Lehtonen.

[pilldoc]

13 minutes ago, Math said:

 

Tier 7: Kari Lehtonen.

 

[JR Ewing]

Campbell 'pretty surprised' by AHL demotion: 'I felt like I was playing well'

 

Edmonton Oilers goaltender Jack Campbell admitted he was "pretty surprised" when he heard that he'd been demoted to the AHL's Bakersfield Condors amidst his ongoing struggles with the big club.

 

"(It was) pretty tough, not gonna lie," Campbell told reporters Thursday, including Sportsnet. "I'm pretty hard on myself, I think that's pretty well documented around the hockey world. Obviously, it's a results league up there - really anywhere - but I felt like I was playing well, had some confidence. But obviously, the numbers weren't good enough."

 

The Oilers placed Campbell on waivers for the purpose of sending him to Bakersfield on Tuesday. The beleaguered netminder owns a 1-4-0 record with Edmonton so far this season to go along with an .873 save percentage and 4.50 goals against average. Campbell also ranks among the 10 worst goalies in both goals saved above average (minus-4.88) and goals saved above expected (minus-3.24) at all strengths, per Evolving-Hockey.

 

Prior to Campbell's demotion, his running mate, Stuart Skinner, had actually posted a lower save percentage (.856). However, Campbell's high-danger save percentage (.639) was worse than Skinner's (.767) at five-on-five, according to Natural Stat Trick.

 

Campbell's comments came right after his first start with the Condors. He allowed four goals on 20 shots during the club's 4-1 defeat to the Abbotsford Canucks.

Abbotsford's third tally at the midway mark of the contest was particularly brutal:

"Tonight was just about getting out there," Campbell said postgame. "I think a lot of emotions, a lot of nerves. I want to play well for the group. ... I wanted to do well, didn't quite go as planned. For me, it's just about staying with my details.

 

"I have some things I've got to keep working on to get to the next level in my game, and that doesn't change whether I'm here or up in the NHL. Just gotta get to work tomorrow."

Thursday's outing was Campbell's first action in the AHL since the 2018-19 campaign. The 31-year-old is currently in the second season of a five-year, $25-million deal. He posted an .888 save percentage and 3.41 goals against average in 2022-23 - his first year in Edmonton.

 

The floundering Oilers are the NHL's second-worst team in the standings in 2023-24 with a 2-9-1 record.

 

https://www.thescore.com/nhl/news/2761171

[J0e Th0rnton]

I'm amazed they are almost as bad as my team this year

[Buffalo Rick]

On 11/11/2023 at 10:18 AM, J0e Th0rnton said:

I'm amazed they are almost as bad as my team this year

Im not too happy with my team either.  This thread sure woke up the forum at least.  LOL.  Got some blood pumping in some.