Tyson Barrie is doing quite well in Nashville. He was actually on their top pairing for a while but has since moved back down to the second pairing. He’s put up the same boxcars as Ekholm has here, 3-6-9, except in 15 games instead of 14.
As you would expect, Barrie QBs the PP on the first unit for Nashville and is seventh on the team with 2:21 per game. Interestingly, though, Nashville’s PP is rather anemic at 17.4%, good enough for 27th in the league, and Barrie so far has a whopping one assist on the PP.
I guess it makes a difference when you’re feeding the puck to Cody Glass and Luke Evangelista as opposed to Connor Mcdavid and Leon Draisaitl. 🙂
The Bison King, meanwhile, has not a sniff in eight games in Carolina and is starting to draw some fire because of it. He’s played up and down the lineup in Carolina since the trade, in part to help cover off for injuries and in part to see if the change in scenery has paid dividends for him yet.
The answer so far appears to be no. He’s struggling just as badly as he has here in Edmonton. Don’t buy the BS he shovelled when he told Sebastian Aho that Edmonton “ruined” him. That’s a player who didn’t take responsibility for his own immaturity and bad behaviour while an Oiler.
Michael Kesselring, the right shot D that was the prospect included in the Nick Bjugstad trade, appears to have benefited from being included in the trade, as the Coyotes – whose lineup isn’t as set in stone as the Oilers is – called him up for a proverbial cup of coffee to see how he would do in the big leagues. This meant he was playing against the Oilers when the Coyotes got beaten in OT.
In his defence, though, their regular guy was injured at the time so injury fill-in was also the name of the game right now.
Good for him, though. With the Oilers he was buried behind Cody Ceci, Evan Bouchard, Brett Kulak, and Vincent Desharnais, so he was unlikely to get time up here. He’s no longer on the active roster so I’m assuming the Coyotes have sent him back down to their farm team in Tucson. He played eight games for the Coyotes and produced a single assist and a -3 during that time – which was actually on their top pairing, a ballsy thing to do with a player on his first call-up.
He’s on their radar for a roster spot in two or three seasons, though, count on it.