Not a single player from the 08-09 Oilers (MacT last year as coach) remains on the team. pic.twitter.com/nZ1Qpn8fOX
— Romulus’ Apotheosis (@RomulusNotNuma) December 15, 2014
When Craig MacTavish fired Dallas Eakins in mid-December and placed himself behind the bench, it prompted a simple observation:
Not a single player from the Oilers’ 2008-09 season remains on the team.
Now, in hockey terms 2008-09 was a long time ago. How long ago was it?
One way to get a grasp of the intervening span of time is to note the number of prominent, now veteran hockey commentators still playing professional hockey at the time: Jeremy Roenick, Aaron Ward, Brad May and Mike Johnson (I’m sure there are others). Hell, Barry Melrose was coaching an NHL team in 2008-09!
In the 2008-09 season, Chris Chelios and Claude Lemieux played a combined 46 NHL games and combined for a sprightly age of 782!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LPddiQXD9c&w=560&h=315]Over such a long span of hockey time, roster continuity is surely not to be an expected norm (is it?), nor is it necessarily desirable. Moreover, an organization that chews through coaches at the rate of the Oilers (6 since the 2008-09 season), is not an organization that exudes continuity and we shouldn’t expect it at any level of the organization (though many jobs throughout the Oilers’ organization appear to be acquired by acclimation and appear to be life-time appointments). So, the absence of roster continuity on the Oilers since 2008-09 isn’t in itself a surprise.
But, that shouldn’t stop us from asking some elementary questions about roster continuity…
Are the Oilers unique in this respect?
What might roster continuity indicate about an organization’s core roster strength, aging and development?
Taylor Hall, recently in a very hot seat, stated publicly that “the best teams in the league don’t break up their core.”
The arbitrariness of the 2008-09-through-the-present timeline gives us an opportunity to test this proposition in some regard.
Here’s a list of all 30 NHL teams ranked in terms of the number of players who played at least 1 NHL game in 2008-09 and still remain on the team.
(I have surely omitted a player here or there, send along corrections if you find an error. I have included, but not counted, players who have returned to their 2008-09 team from a hiatus elsewhere, just for fun.)
Exactly half of the league has retained 4 or more NHL players since the 2008-09 season. It is rather unsurprising to see, by and large, the league’s perennial heavy hitters among the best at maintaining roster continuity.
The other half of the league, retaining 3 or less NHL players over the same period, unsurprisingly looks like a police line-up for petty thieves and public drunkards.
But, even among the bottom half of this list, it would appear the Oilers have a serious problem with roster retention and continuity.
Take Outs
1. Recently, there’s been a lot of griping about the Oilers’ draft record over the past few years. Here’s a commonplace version of the complaint:
However, they didn’t get much help in the way of picks in subsequent rounds.
Tyler Pitlick (31st overall in 2010), is still trying to become an every day NHL player. Martin Marincin (46th overall, in 2010) is back in the minors. Curtis Hamilton (48th overall, 2010) has yet to play an NHL game.
… Oscar Klefbom (19th overall, 2011) is still trying to develop into an effective NHL defenceman, while David Musil, (31st overall, 2011) and Travis Ewanyk (74th overall, 2011) will be hard pressed not to follow the lead of Samu Perhonen (62nd overall, 2011) and become draft-day busts.
… They then took Mitchell Moroz with their second pick in the draft that year… Moroz has yet to get a sniff in the NHL.
I’m not a fan of a lot of these picks to be frank. However, complaining, for example, that a 2011 1st round pick is “still trying to develop into an effective NHL defenceman” and that a 2012 2nd round draft pick “has yet to get a sniff in the NHL” strikes me as delusional.
It is wildly unreasonable to expect draft picks, even 1st and 2nd rounders, to make an impact at the NHL level in such a short time span.
What the list above points to, in some respect, is the need to take a much longer view at roster construction. Insofar as the Oilers’ draft record is failing the Oilers as an NHL team, it is doing so from a much more distant past than the 2012 second round (of which, only 3 forwards have registered an NHL game for a total boxcar line of 33 1-5-6).
Look to the draft years of the mid-to-late oughts for evidence of the Oilers’ current NHL woes (I’d recommend, especially, the 2007 and 2009 drafts, the latter of which boasted what one scribe referred to as potentially the “whole package” of a “power forward” in Cam Abney.
2. Continuity for its own sake, especially on a dog of a team in the Oilers, is not a given as a good thing. However, it is hard to look back through the Oilers’ last 6 years and identify the gains made by shedding useful NHL players.
Cogliano, Gilbert, Horcoff, Brodziak, Penner, Gagner, Hemsky, Cole, Smid, and Lubo all played on the 2008-09 Oilers.
Most of those players would still be pretty useful for the 2014-15 Oilers.
3. As we prime ourselves to watch yet another NHL veteran drafted and developed by the Oilers walk away (Petry), it is useful to look at the above lists and take note of how many of the stronger teams aim for roster continuity.
4. Let’s add a bunch of caveats. In any individual case regarding a team or a player, especially over a 6 season span, it would be silly to consider it against some arbitrary standard of “retention and continuity are goods and ends unto themselves.”
In no way should someone attempt to make a grounding principle out of this information.
That said, I believe it to be instructive to consider roster construction from the long term perspectives of retention and continuity. It helps us to take a broader view of failings and successes and what factors into them.
[EDIT: Reader T. Adams passed along this note: “You have the Dallas Stars listed at 0 players, however Trevor Daley has been with the team since 03-04.” Thanks! Sorry for the error. [adsanity_group num_ads=1 num_columns=1 group_ids=1426 /]Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
