Oilers Gameday @ Nashville: A Scheduled Loss Is Imminent

The Oilers are back in action in Nashville tonight, taking on PK Subban and the rest of the reigning Western Conference champions. The Predators are an actual Good Team in the NHL and the Oilers are a team in the NHL and that’s about the only similarity.

This is the point where we’d put in some semi-positive stuff to get us pumped for the game.

Instead some numbers:

1.08 – Taylor Hall’s points per game in New Jersey

0.63 – Milan Lucic’s points per game in Edmonton

0.70 – Jordan Eberle’s points per game in New York

0.40 – Ryan Strome’s points per game in Edmonton

Now, I’m no mathematician, but it appears that Milan Lucic and Ryan Strome combined don’t even match Taylor Hall’s output, never mind Hall and Eberle’s outputs.

Correlation may not equal causation, but that’s a whole bunch of points not being scored by the guys who ostensibly replaced the former Oilers.

(Side note to the dummy who gave me the gears a while back because I was comparing Hall and Lucic despite them not playing in the same number of games:  that’s why it’s points per game.)

Keys to the Game

Edmonton

• Score first and try to score more than one goal and for the love of god play the game like it’s an actual game and not practice or whatever they’ve been doing lately.
• Also don’t leave the goalie out to dry.

Nashville

• Literally show up. That’s all it takes.

Players to Watch

Edmonton

• I mean… Connor. He’s good and stuff and he’s going to have to put the team on his back if they don’t want to be embarrassed over the final 40. Poor kid.

Nashville

• You can’t watch Nashville without paying attention to PK Subban. He’s electric and enigmatic and a guy I can’t imagine not wanting on my team, but I’m not Marc Bergevin so what do I know.

Projected Lineups

Edmonton

Patrick Maroon – Connor McDavid – Leon Draisaitl

Milan Lucic – Ryan Nugent-Hopkins – Jesse Pukjujarvi

Jujhar Khaira – Ryan Strome – Mike Cammalleri

Drake Caggiula – Mark Letestu – Zack Kassian

Darnell Nurse – Adam Larsson

Oscar Klefbom – Kris Russell

Andrej Sekera – Matt Benning

Cam Talbot

Nashville

Pontus Aberg – Ryan Johansen – Viktor Arvidsson

Kevin Fiala – Kyle Turris – Craig Smith

Scott Hartnell – Nick Bonino – Colton Sissons

Miikka Salomaki – Calle Jarnkrok – Auston Watson

Roman Josi – Ryan Ellis

Mattias Ekholm – PK Subban

Alexei Emelin – Yannick Weber

Pekka Rinne

Notes

It’s not even worth doing the math anymore. This season is all but done and Peter Chiarelli finally said some words yesterday. They weren’t great words, and they were certainly not inspiring.

The bright spot of the day was seeing some of the Edmonton MSM actually question some of the decisions of management. I’m glad I didn’t get my hopes too far up, because they were back on their bullshit again today.

https://twitter.com/dstaples/status/950764111150727168

I’m just… I’m at a loss for words.

Column A: Reasons the Oilers are bad this year
Column B: Why rainbows are see-through
Column C: THERE IS NO COLUMN C BECAUSE IT'S NOT A COMPARISON THAT ANYONE CAN REASONABLY MAKE

— Megan (@mig14) January 9, 2018

This team, man. This team.

What an absolute mess.