It finally happened. The day that Oilers fans have been waiting for has arrived. Peter Chiarelli has been fired.
When he was hired, the fan base was excited that an experienced outside voice was taking over. Add Connor McDavid to that, and the expectations were high that Chiarelli would guide this team towards being a contender.
In his 3.5 years here, the Oilers made the playoffs once.
I have spent a long time defending Chiarelli’s biggest trades. I am not going to change my stance on those now that he has been fired. I still believe that the market values of Hall and Larsson along with the Oilers having a surplus of scoring wingers at the time made that Hall trade more even than the talent level would of the two players would suggest. I believe that Chiarelli and McLellan were not fans of how Eberle played without the puck, otherwise, they would’ve held on to him through last season. They are up against the cap without Eberle, so he still would’ve been moved prior to this season if not when it happened. Considering that it was a cap dump, I liked the return they got from NYI because Strome was a young player with some offensive potential (35-40 pts a year max) that contributed when he was here, and that could’ve contributed for a long time had he not been moved for a chance at an immediate increase in offense that clearly didn’t work out.
Chiarelli’s mandate upon arriving in Edmonton was to fix the defense and goaltending. He also needed to rebuild the team as quickly as possible because McDavid was set to start tearing the league apart, and he needed a team behind him if the Oilers were to become a contender. He signed Sekera right away, which was a major upgrade on what existed. He was a major factor in the success of the Oilers in 2016-17, and the loss of that particular version of Sekera has been an obstacle too large for the Oilers to overcome since. He signed Russell, who has been nothing short of a rock for the Oilers. He has his flaws, but he has brought defending to a team that sorely needed it. He paid dearly for Larsson, but Larsson has been another rock back there for the majority of his time as an Oiler (this past weekend aside). He acquired Talbot during that 2015 draft. Talbot has been inconsistent for Edmonton, but he was great during the 2016-17 season. He took a risk on Koskinen this off-season, but it had worked out well so far. Both are marked improvements over what was here when Chiarelli was hired.
Chiarelli did succeed at improving the defense and the goaltending, although you can certainly argue that both positions aren’t where they need to be just yet. There has been a reliance upon young, developing players like Klefbom and Nurse to take on big roles on the blueline. Klefbom is just now scratching the surface of how good he can be, and Nurse isn’t far behind him, but it has taken time for them to get to where they are.
The thing I’ll say about Chiarelli…
If you’d like to read more about what Ryan (@edmoildrops) has to say about Chiarelli, click HERE. He also goes into what he thinks Bob Nicholson meant about “something being in the water”, future moves, and what he’d like to see in the new GM.
