Training Camp Day 2 News and Notes

Early start to training camp today, as when I showed up at 9:00 there was a group of players already out on the ice running through drills with OKC Barons coaches Todd Nelson and Rocky Thompson. The players out on the ice for this session were the ones that weren’t playing in tomorrow night’s split squad game. The only real notable guy out there was Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and man oh man did he look good out there.

The “most pessimistic option” of RNH returning to the line up no sooner that November 1^st is overly pessimistic from what I saw the last two days. This morning Nugent-Hopkins was looking great during all the drills, his shot was quick off the stick and came with speed. He looks comfortable out there and from an interview I heard today with Bob Stauffer on 630 Ched’s OilersNow, he says face offs feel good, he’s more confident this year than last already with his shoulder and he’s happy with the velocity of his shot. Here’s hoping for an early to mid October return for the Nuge.

Not long after the first session ended fans and media alike poured over to the north ring at Millennium Place in Sherwood Park. I wasn’t sure what we were going to see, I thought that we would get another look at Coach Eakins running the other groups through more rigorous drills. But instead we were treated to a blue/white game featuring the players that will be competing tomorrow night in both Edmonton and Calgary for the split squad pre-season action.

Team Blue

There were some very interesting line combinations today for the scrimmage. Team Blue had Taylor Hall between Ryan Smyth and Ales Hemsky, they were together yesterday during the line rushes but I was anxious to see how they’d go during game action. The line started slowly but as the game wore on the chemistry started building and culminated by an absolute beauty of a goal by Ryan Smyth. Hall received a pass from Hemsky on the right side, gained a bit of open ice and fired a bullet of a pass over to Smyth for the tap in, it was a very nice play. Also noticeable was the fact the Smyth kept up just fine with Hemsky and Hall.

There were two other lines on Blue team that had some positives. Marc Arcobello centered a line with Nail Yakupov and Linus Omark on the wings. This line was going early scoring the teams first goal and seemed to have chemistry immediately, there was how every very little defensive play from this line as I noticed a few times Yakupov was the last guy back when the play went the other way. The other goal for team Blue came from a line that has 2/3rds of a pretty decent NHL 4^th line; Anton Lander lined up between Jesse Joensuu and Marco Roy. Roy didn’t look out of place but the Oilers aren’t going to have him play 4^th line minutes when he’ll play more significant minutes in junior. Joensuu scored a pretty nice goal when he intercepted an errant pass in the neutral zone, walked in and fired one top shelf on goalie Richard Bachman.

On defence Team Blue had Andrew Ference paired with Darnell Nurse, who looked good together. Ference has really impressed me the last two days, I’m excited to see him in real game action. 1^st round pick Nurse looks solid out there again, he made some good plays in his own end and again showed a willingness to jump up on the rush, his vision is solid and that makes for a good first pass out of the zone. Justin Schultz played alongside Brendan Davidson which was an ok pairing Davidson had a major gaffe that led to a goal against. Schultz looks more willing to take the body, but doesn’t have the ability to throw the huge hit. The other defensive pairing was Denis Grebeshkov and rookie David Musil, nothing fancy there with either of them, there was a pass from Hemsky to a wide open Grebeshkov in the slot and he didn’t manage to get a quality shot off.

Team White

The first line on team white had Jordan Eberle on the right side, Ryan Hamilton on the left, and centered by Sam Gagner. Eberle opened the scoring with a shot top cheese over starting goalie Devan Dubnyk. Hamilton had a number or scoring chances and didn’t look out of place on that line, I don’t think he stick on that line but there’s always a chance. Perhaps the best line on the day was Boyd Gordon, with David Perron and Ryan Jones, these three were strong on the fore check, and had the ice tilted in their favor almost every time they were on the ice. In fact if you watched or paid attention on twitter you would have seen that Jones scored a goal late in the 3^rd period to bring team white to within one, then with 5 seconds left and an extra attacker on the ice Boyd Gordon scored the equalizer to force overtime a shoot out.

The other two lines on the team I’m not going to go into in length. The “3^rd” line had Will Acton centering Ben Eager and Tyler Pitlick, not too much from them but I will say Pitlick looked better out there to me then Eager. On the 4^th line Travis Ewanyk was between Greg Chase and Ty Blicke, again nothing spectacular out of these 3.

Guarding the blue lines for team white we got a look at Petry paired with Smid, Nick Schultz paired with Taylor Fedun and Philip Larsen with Martin Marincin. All of them were ok in the fact that they weren’t to noticeable, there were now “Holy Crap, get off the ice you bum” moments that I noticed. I think maybe most impressive was just how quick Philip Larsen was, when he was acquired in the Horcoff deal I’ll admit that I’d never heard of him but he quickly impressed with his quickness and puck moving abilities. Larsen will probably play in OKC this year but there might be a player there.

Wrap Up

It was a good two days of camp. We got a good look at some of the major question marks during the offseason; Hall at Center, 4^th line center options (Lander/Acton), and what the lineup might look like with RNH out for a while. It was a good first look into new Coach Dallas Eakins coaching philosophy, and I think it’s new to these players and will hopefully work. Real games start tomorrow with a split squad match against the Flames tomorrow and we should get a little better look on how some of these guys will perform, but we will have a preview of that up on the site tomorrow.

Until then, Thanks for reading.