Guest Post: Silent No More…

by Matt Burns

This is my first blog post on The Oilers Rig, so be kind. I don’t know anything about anything, or so I’m told.

I’m having a really hard time with the verbal around the Oilers right now, and I literally can’t keep it to myself any longer. In typical Canadian style, I’m sorry in advance that you are being subjected to the rantings of an apparent lunatic.

I want to set the table a bit. Almost exactly a year ago, the Oilers traded Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson. This move was largely lauded by the MSM and Larsson improved the back end, in particular the right side of the Defense – an area that teams had been taking advantage of the Oil since basically forever.

That said, to say that this team didn’t miss Hall’s scoring is disingenuous. A lot of this was covered up by a healthy, highly productive and award winning season from McDavid. He figured into over 40% of the Oilers Scoring this year, and the verbal that anything other than McDavid was the MAJOR reason for the Oilers’ resurgence is ludicrous.

All season long, those most vocal against the trade were told how little we knew about hockey, and every time Larsson did anything of note, Twitter was littered with “SEE DUMMY?!? YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING”.

Last season saw the first time this team made the playoffs in over a decade – and it was great. When the season was over, and as @Lowetide correctly pointed out, the team lacked balance. Holes in the lineup are / were obvious: 2nd pair Right Handed Defense, Right Wing depth after Eberle, Upgrade the fourth line. And, a 3rd Line (ideally right handed) Center if you plan to play Draisaitl at wing. These are not insurmountable.

A quick aside – we have yet to REALLY determine that Drai can drive a line. It is looking positive, but we don’t know. And as we saw in the playoffs, secondary scoring is critical (our vaunted Oilers MSM ran Eberle out of town due to it!) McDavid can only do so much by himself.

A major issue that was exposed and exploited in the playoffs was D-zone related. When Klefbom and Larsson weren’t on the ice, the Oilers got hemmed in. A number of goals against were due to bad clearings, bad head-man passes, long shifts in the zone – with McLellan getting out-coached a lot of nights, this became VERY apparent.

By eye and by analytics, there are two culprits – first, a young and inexperienced 3rd pair. I Love Benning – his upside is awesome, and he was a terrific Chiarelli find. I am also confident Nurse will figure it out, but he’s YOUNG and Youth = Chaos.

Second, and more impactfully, the second pairing wasn’t great. They got hemmed in a lot, in particular by big bodied lines (Thornton, Getzlaf, etc) despite the ‘Try’ and ‘Heart’ that Sekera and Russell showed. I thought Russell was relatively effective, but was batting too high in the order.

So we got to the second round – everyone is ecstatic. The cries of ‘Hey, look at us, we’re the ’06-’07 penguins!’ were everywhere, and were repeated by the usual culprits. But, I, along with a lot of other Oiler fans were optimistic and we had every reason to be. Yes, we had some holes, but they were manageable. With the right approach, we could find the ever-elusive balance AND have enough money going forward to sign our studs.

And then we find out that Sekera is hurt for 6-9 months and the Oilers brass lose their goddamn minds…

FAST FORWARD TO THE LAST 24 HRS.

First, we trade Eberle – on the surface, fine, we get a younger right wing for less dollars (that doesn’t shoot as much, doesn’t score as much, but has grit and ‘the hockey men’ like him). This is a downgrade at RW – where we already had a hole – but from a money perspective, I can follow the logic. (Yet again, however, we are relying on a young, unproven player to fill an important role and hope he performs WAY above what his history would suggest he will…where have we heard that before?)

THEN – with this new found financial freedom, what do we do? Go to NYI and pry Hamonic out (a terrific solution to the 2nd Pairing RHD problem)? NO – let’s go with the SAME D-CORPS as last year except THIS TIME NO SEKERA. And, let’s pay more for it. And, let’s handcuff ourselves for FOUR YEARS.

I’m at a loss.

What if McD gets injured? (Oilers Twitter it was correctly pointed out that if McD gets injured, it doesn’t really matter what else is done, and that is true -although if we hadn’t traded Hall…).

What if Talbot can’t play 70 games next year?

What if one of our Swedish studs get hurt?

What if Maroon can’t sustain his production?

What if Benning has a sophomore slump?

What if (gasp!) McDavid has trouble repeating his 100 point campaign?

WHAT IF THERE IS ANY KIND OF REGRESSION WITH ANYONE?

These two deals make the Oilers worse. Full Stop. They don’t address any of the needs above. Nor does any of this make Edmonton more capable of competing with the likes of Nashville, Calgary, St Louis, Minnesota, or even Chicago (who couldn’t manage to win a single game in this year’s postseason). In fact, I would argue it makes us less so. And, if Calgary is able to make the Hamonic deal happen (WHICH IS THE VERBAL) they will have a top 4 of Hamilton, Brodie, Gio and Hamonic. That is a nice top 4 D. We, on the other hand, will have a top 4 of what – Klefbom, Larsson, Russell and Benning? Not nearly good enough. And the MSM is already running out the line that there likely ‘isn’t a lot more coming’ (which I’m sure has nothing to do with the fact that all of our trade bullets are basically spent!).

I had a conversation with @mig14 while the Oil were playing about how fun the playoffs were, and how great it was to be competitive again. But I now see her point of view more clearly – the MSM in Edmonton spend most of their time vilifying players so we can trade them for less than full value. They should be spending time questioning objectively poor deals. It’s maddening. I get that ‘access’ is important, but have a little professional credibility FFS.

Full disclosure: I didn’t like the Hall deal, but could live with it on the surface. WE lost the deal, but Larsson stabilized the D. To get that, though, we spent one of the big bullets we had, and EVERYONE thought we should have received more in the deal. I have the same thought about the Eberle deal. Chiarelli is not good at big deals.

I also have to say that thinking that the Russell signing isn’t a knee-jerk reaction to the Sekera news is putting your head firmly in the sand. I’m not of the opinion that Russell isn’t an NHL-caliber defenseman. I’m actually a Russell fan – he does some good things and he works his ass off. He’d be a good 5-6 D-man, paid at that rate.

Kris Russell is in no way worth $4MX4 with a NMC. That is batshit crazy.

And the WORST part of this whole thing is that this should be the year they go for it. Pull out all the stops. Trade away all the draft picks. Get this team set for a deep Stanley Cup run. Instead, we get worse on RW, and our D-corps is due for a drop-off. It just is.

And yet, you hear none of this from Spector, Rishaug, Gregor, Staples, Van Diest, etc – the guys with access and a stable / binders of hockey men that they get their info from. If you question them with any kind of ‘stats based’ argument they shut you down with a ‘you don’t know what’s going on in the room’, which is a total cop-out.

The Oilers are burning Connor’s last year on an ELC with a team that is significantly worse off (by eye and by stat!). And that is just so disappointing. As Matt Henderson pointed out on Twitter, “I”m just disappointed the team doesn’t want to improve” which pretty much sums it up.

One last thought – if I’m Connor McDavid and his agent a) I am asking for the moon ($14M sounds right) and b) I’m looking at the shortest contract that gets me to free agency. Because this current management team is not making this team more prepared to take on the league’s best, and I’m here to win.

We are witnessing some god-awful management – it is hard to live in Calgary and hear the Flames fans rightly laugh at us. This is the Chiarelli I was really hoping we would avoid, somehow.

But, I don’t know anything about anything so I should just be happy about this, I guess. At least that’s what the MSM guys are telling me…