Here’s another post from my buddy Ryan (@edmoildops). My apologies in getting this up late, it was obviously written before the Oilers loss to Winnipeg!
5 losses in a row. Ouch. Merry Christmas to us, Oilers fans! There’s no sense in beating around the bush here. The Oilers are playing HORRIBLY right now.
The team can’t keep the puck out of its net right now. They’ve allowed 4 or more goals in each of those 5 consecutive losses. It’s quite clear that losing Klefbom and Russell is having a MASSIVE impact on the team defensively, and the team’s save % is suffering as a result. That’s the most simple and blatantly obvious analysis that I can provide.
The other side of the coin is that the Oilers have only scored 12 goals in those 5 losses. 2.4 goals per game isn’t good enough to win in the NHL. It’s that simple. The Oilers are getting 2.84 goals per game this season as of right now, which also isn’t enough.
Fans and media members have been critical of the roster that Peter Chiarelli has assembled for this season. The depth of the defence has been questioned since the injuries to Klefbom and Russell, which I think is utterly ridiculous. Klefbom is the best defenceman on the team, and Russell has been solid in a 2nd pairing role this season. Any team would be struggling defensively if you took two of their top 4 defenders away (one of which being their best one). The defence was already short-handed due to Andrej Sekera’s injury in August, and the two most recent injuries just made it worse. Injuries to 3 defencemen means that defencemen slotted 7, 8, and 9 on the depth chart are forced into action. The quality of those players is always going to be lower than the quality of the injured players, and it will be below NHL standard in most cases. The injuries are not the GM’s fault. Russell will be back next game it sounds like, and it doesn’t make sense to rob Peter to pay Paul by trading roster players to bring in another defenceman because of Klefbom being out for another month (a month that concludes with a 10-day break).
The star forwards for the Oilers have been great this season. Outside of the big three, there has been very little to write home about. The Oilers have not been getting production from the vast majority of the forwards this season. There are 15 forwards that have played in more than 13 games this season. That is almost 1/3 of the 38 games that have been played thus far. The following is a list that shows the % of change in production that each of those 15 Oilers forwards has had from last season to this season. The % change was calculated by comparing each player’s points per game averages from last season and this season. The numbers for Ryan Strome and Ryan Spooner represent their efforts only while playing for the Oilers this season. Here’s the list:
Click here to read the rest of Ryan’s post!
