Oilers Gameday – vs. Buffalo

Jack Eichel is in town tonight, along with the rest of the Buffalo Sabres. It’s important to note that Eichel, this year’s 2nd overall pick JUST passed Connor McDavid on the rookie scoring leaders list, despite McDavid having been out a month. (If you’re interested, Eichel is scoring 0.52ppg and McDavid was at 0.92ppg. Yep. Definitely should have drafted Eichel.)

Last Games

Edmonton (10-15-2)
I am pleased to report that not only did the Oilers win their last game (2-1 over Dallas), they did it on the back of a stellar effort from Anders Nilsson, whose new nickname should probably just be “Thief”. Jordan Eberle broke his million game goal drought with a hell of a snipe about 45 seconds into overtime, and there was much rejoicing among Oilers fans.

Side note: Mark Fayne got stapled to the bench after only 8 minutes of icetime. Coach McClellan said after the game “In fairness to Mark, he needs to hear my evaluation first before I tell you.” (Hint: It was probably not good)

Buffalo (11-12-3)
I don’t know. I don’t care. (According to Google they beat Arizona 5-2 on Friday night.) Google also tells me that the Sabres mascot is named Sabretooth, which is weird because sabretooths are tigers, but the animal on the jersey is most definitely a buffalo.

Keys to the Game

Edmonton
Play the full 60. Sure, they’re coming in off a 2-game home win streak (wait, what?), but both games have had some pretty, uh, major lapses in play. Were it not for Nilsson, those Ws would definitely have been Ls, without even a pity point to get us through the night.

It’s also be nice if the D could give Nilsson some support, and not let so many pucks through. That may be asking a lot, though, so I’ll just stick with “play the full 60”.

Buffalo
Win? Get the puck to Eichel? Get the puck to Evander Kane? He’s been lighting it up a bit lately. I don’t know anything about the Sabres, other than my favourite player (and former student) Tyler Ennis is on the IR, and so I genuinely don’t pay any attention to them.

Players to Watch

Edmonton
Anders Nilsson. He’s been rock solid the last couple games, posting a 3-2 record (and .942 sv%) in his last 5 starts. Is he the answer? For now. Something interesting I saw in my limited research about him – in the losses to Carolina and Toronto, he only faced 51 shots combined. In the 3 wins, he faced 40+ shots each time. I’m not saying we need to let the other team fire the puck at him 40 times every game, but I wonder if he’s one of those goalies who legitimately gets better as the game goes on and he sees more rubber. Whatever the case, we should all be thankful he’s in net, and that Mike Comrie doesn’t play here anymore.

Buffalo
Let’s watch Jack Eichel. And then imagine him in Oiler blue (which would have been a thing had we not rigged the Draft Lottery for the 4th time). And then look at his 0.52ppg. That’s all I’ve got.

Lineups

Edmonton*

Taylor Hall – Leon Draisaitl – Jordan Eberle

Iiro Pakarinen – Ryan Nugent-Hopkins – Teddy Purcell

Matt Hendricks – Mark Letestu – Lauri Korpikoski

Jujhar Khaira – Anton Lander – Luke Gazdic

Darnell Nurse – Andrej Sekera

Oscar Klefbom – Mark Fayne (or maybe Davidson)

Justin Schultz – Eric Gryba

Anders Nilsson

Buffalo

Evander Kane – Ryan O’Reilly – Sam Reinhart

Brian Gionta – Jack Eichel – Jamie McGinn

Johan Larsson – Zemgus Girgensons – Matt Moulson

Nicolas Deslauriers – David Legwand – Marcus Foligno

Josh Gorges – Rasmus Ristolainen

Carlo Colaiacovo – Zach Bogosian

Jake McCabe – Cody Franson

Linus Ullmark

*Or you can put the Oilers lineup in a blender. I don’t know if Fayne sits tonight, or if Klefbom will be good to go, or if Eberle will be good to go. Plus Khaira played up with Hall and Drai last game. So it’s a giant crap shoot.

Final Thoughts

Hockey News/Sportsnet “analyst” Mike Brophy wrote about the Draft Lottery yesterday, and called a potential Oilers win an atrocity. Admittedly, it’d be hilarious if they did win again, and drafted Auston Matthews, or used that pick to bundle up and get a defenceman. Mostly, I think it’d be really funny to see them win again just to prove first and foremost that the NHL does not rig the draft lottery; watching Bill Daly fend off an aneurysm as he announced the Oilers as the winners would be equally awesome.

All that said: Brophy is dead wrong. You can read his ramblings here, but in case you don’t he basically posits that it’s unfair for perennially bad teams to draft high because then the good players all end up playing on bad teams. He actually said “Failure should not be rewarded. And yet it is. And it might be again.” Matt Henderson over at OilersNation drafted a pretty good rebuttal before I got around to it, so go read what he has to say.

I guess my question is: if the bad teams can’t draft high, how do they get better? In Edmonton, we know the pain of having a pretty mediocre team that isn’t bad enough to get the really high draft picks. So we draft between 10 and 20, and then we haven’t really made our lineup any better, so we can’t attract any FA signings, and we don’t have anything to give up in a trade for a legit roster player, and the cycle continues. When we got the Hall-Nuge-Yak picks, that was huge for us, but it hasn’t actually made the team that much better (for reasons we don’t need to get into here).

Basically Brophy is suggesting that bad teams should continue to be bad. I’m wondering what his tune would be if Toronto had drafted number one 4 of the last 6 seasons. I’m guessing he’d be against any change that would make it harder for the Leafs to win the lottery. I guess we’ll never know since the Leafs can’t even get that right.

The part of his article that made me laugh out loud suggests that Connor McDavid was the magic balm for the Oilers, indicating that Brophy doesn’t actually know anything about the franchise. For anyone who gets paid to write or talk or think about hockey to believe that McDavid being injured is the reason the Oilers are again near the bottom of the league standings isn’t just laughable, it smacks of an ignorance I didn’t even know a Sportsnet hack could possess.