The West remains Hostile Territory for the Edmonton Oilers

If humanity can land a robot on a comet, the Edmonton Oilers can certainly start beating teams closer to the Rockies.

With the CFR road trip over, the Edmonton Oilers fly back home with a record of 2-3-0, good for 4 points out of a possible 10, or an efficiency of 40%. This is in line with what I expected before the team left Edmonton and as of tonight, they are the only team in the entire NHL without a win against a member of the Western Conference with a putrid record of 0-7-1. Even Buffalo has taken one. Let that sink in.

Flip the coin though and it’s as if you switched universes. Against the East, as of this writing, the Oilers are 6-2-0. The split is even with 8 games against each conference out of the 16 they have played so far. The same goes for games at home and away, where Rexall Place has seen an even showing at 4-4-0 while the road has proven a killer at 2-5-1. Even the ratio of home and away games against each conference is even. What all of this means I really can’t say for sure, but it is interesting to note that aside the impenetrable wall that is the West right now, everything else being split even, it is on the road where the season has gone sideways for the Oilers.

On the road they traded wins at 2-2 with the East and they have been denied by the West at 0-3-1. The most troubling part of all this is that the Oilers have yet to play a single game against 7 out of the 8 western teams that made the playoffs last season. They got one game against the kings and that was their worst game so far. Granted, Dallas, Colorado and Minnesota, are doing just as bad as the Oilers right now, but that still leaves 4 highly competitive teams in San Jose, Anaheim, Chicago and St. Louis.

In other words the record tells us that the team is holding the fort at home, going .500, quite impressive for this lot. They have also taken advantage of a relatively weaker Eastern conference with a success rate of 100% at home and .500 on the road, good for a total of 75% of points won or 12 out of 16. Against the West they have been destroyed no matter where the bout is at, and they have rescued one stranded point on the road against Vancouver.

Dallas Eakins learned to coach in the East, so that could begin to explain why his team is doing so well against that style of play while being unceremoniously stampeded on by the Central and Pacific jolly giants. Last season the Oilers went 15-3o-5 against their brethren, good for 35 points out of a possible 100, or 35% of points available.  Versus the Atlantic and Metropolitan rivals they went sort of even thanks to the Bettman points with a record of 14-14-4, for a success rate of 50% with 32 points out of a possible 64. The two combined gave us the glorious total of 67 points that put the Oilers in 13th on their conference and 28th place overall and gave them Leon Draisaitl.

Going .500 against the west last season would have meant any combination of extra wins and OT losses for 15 more points and reaching the all elusive overall .500 in a whole season with 82 points, something not seen on these lands since the spring of 2009. Right now the Oilers would have to either win 7 games plus 1 OT loss against the West in order to reach that plateau or trade at least 2 wins for every loss until they level (at that rate it would take 21 games against the West, or until Jan. 9, 2015). It’s a bit of a tall order. I’m not even talking about playoff territory here, all of this is just about breaking even.

The bad news is that time is running out pretty fast for Eakins and his lot to learn to take points from their corral. 6 of the 8 games left this month are against the West and then December has the potential to be groundhog day every game day with an astounding 13 out of 14 games against sunset foes and 7 of them on the road.

As I wrote earlier on the post: Road + Western opposition= popped veins on Dallas Eakins and Oilers Fans in tears. If the Oilers were standing at the edge of a precipice a few days ago, they might be staring at a black hole come New Year’s eve.

The Oilers haven’t been better nor worse without Taylor Hall, results wise.