By Jeremy Wright
Tonight’s Toronto Maple Leafs loss, their 8 game losing skid in the midst of a playoff race and their last 128 games should be taken as a lesson and warning sign for fans and management of the Edmonton Oilers. For sustained success our team needs to be cut from the same strategy cloth as the power house teams of the West rather than the luck dependent roller coaster of a team like the Leafs.
Many an advanced stats pusher saw this coming from miles and miles off. From Mirtle to Dellow to @Hope_Smoke to the people at Pension Plan Puppets, they have all predicted over the last 15 or so months that the results the team had been getting were not to be trusted. Unsustainable shooting percentages and long runs of abnormally strong goal tending were masking the issues of a team destined to fail. They are a team built on a foundation of near league bottom possession numbers this season and last. All the anecdotal chest beating from the majority of the mainstream Toronto and National media is for not because most of the time what they say is just that, anecdotal.
What it means to us Oilers fans is that our road apples aren’t falling too far from the horse. They are also a team with horrendous possession numbers and those numbers, that matter so much in gauging how much sustain a team actually has, have gone the wrong way this season. Like the Leafs, our team is now getting goal tending that is masking the team’s deficiencies by way of empty, out-shot wins. The numbers eventually catch up to a team no matter how much grit and character a they may have.
I hope that Kevin Lowe, Craig MacTavish and Dallas Eakins were watching that game tonight and saw the looks on the faces of Nonis, Carlyle and the stunned fans. They are faces of people fooled and confused.
Please, get our Oilers on the right path this summer. These 8 longs years are punishment enough and another near decade of pain is not desired by anyone.
Feel free to share some banter with me on Twitter, @borisnikov, be he hockey or otherwise.
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