Oilers losing with gusto
For all the talk about process and improvement, the Oilers keep losing all the same. Meanwhile Calgary completed an epic comeback. Everyone is to blame for this disgusting season: players, coaches, managers, top brass, ownership, scouts.
Players for not playing with guts. At the end of the day it is the players who go skate and have the game in their hands. Scrivens can’t make the stops when they count and he resorts to temper tantrums when things go awry. The defenders make ill advised pinches and together with the forwards are a turnover machine. Players like Eberle disappear for large stretches, why does he have the A still?. Hendricks and Gordon never take a shift off, give them the letters. Taylor Hall has so little faith in his teammates he tries to go all Michael Jordan and win the game all by himself. Yakupov is just skating around like a ping ball. Draisaitl is a non factor and that can’t be good for his development. Arcobello is being asked to do more than he is capable of. Ditto for Ference.
Dallas Eakins and his coaches are giving this team systems that result in very stupid turnovers, a limp powerplay and a pile of losses. How many games have the Oilers won with Justin Schultz leading them in ice time? ZERO!!!. Kpeping Scrivens on the ice time and again after being lit up on first periods is as stupid a decision as it gets. Never mind the one time it happened to Fasth he was pulled. Marincin and Yakupov get stapled to the bench as soon as they looked the wrong way yet Schultz keeps getting sweet minutes with nothing to show for. The arrogance of Dallas to do away with the memorabilia form the lockers when he was coming as a greenhorn NHL coach with nothing proven has come back to haunt him. MacTavish was right when he said Eakins was like him, two arrogant men who think because they had success in one place it immediately translates to everything else they do.
I don’t know how long it should take for Craig Ramsey to instill his knowledge, either it takes more than 3 months or that’s another failed hire. Chabot still here? How many goalies have been under his tutelage and how many have found success?. The coaches have set up their players to pad their secondary stats and nothing more.
The pro scouts either can’t find proper players for trades or just don’t have the ability to do so. Craig MacTavish going with Arco and Drai undid all the good he seemed to have done on defence and at goal. As for the amateur scouts, since 2009 Marincin might be the only non first rounder to stick with the team. Terrible scouting has left this team with an unbalanced roster with weaknesses all over. Management keeps banking on the strategy of hoping for the best and NOT planning for the worst.
Daryl Katz not really giving much thought to what’s going on here, or is that the case? Hard to believe such a successful man would allow all this failure unless it aligns with his goals and expectations. The games are sold out, the arena district developments are a done deal, so he stands to make far more profit from that than from a few extra playoff games. As for spending to the cap, well this is a front gate sports market, so the salaries come form the fans pretty much, as long as the fans keep paying, the team will keep spending it on players salaries. No real loss there for the Oilers owner. No incentives to fire long time friends and make deep changes at the Kingsway office.
This culture of arrogance and knowing better than everyone else comes from the top. Ever since Kevin Lowe took on front office duties (while having ZERO experience at it) the Oilers have made the playoffs exactly 3 times in 13 seasons, 14 seasons most likely now. Under his tutelage this team has seen draft picks refusing to sign, player being punished for speaking out, players being rushed from injury and coaches being replaced faster than oil filters.
Top to bottom mistakes have compounded and the end result is season after season of futility, and after all the talk and all the stats, the endgame looks like this: (click on the picture for a larger view)
Enough said.