Top of the mornin’ to Y’all! I’m really happy to let you know that Beer League Heroes is going to be working alongside a new and emerging Oilers blog called Edmonton Oil Drops. Our good friend Ryan who runs that site has agreed to re-post some of his material here and we’re glad to be able to share it with you.
Please give Ryan a follow on Twitter here!
Bob Nicholson spoke of Peter Chiarelli having a “plan” to get the Oilers back into the playoffs this season back in April after announcing that Chiarelli would be keeping his job coming into this season. He said that the fans would be quite pleased with “the plan” once it was unveiled.
There was never a fancy unveiling of “the plan”, and the early season inconsistencies that have plagued the Oilers have fans questioning whether or not there is even a plan at all.
Last season, Chiarelli described the reasons for the Oilers’ struggles as “death by a thousand cuts”. There were a lot of little things that went wrong. The PK was horrendous (especially at home), the powerplay was woeful, the team couldn’t defend, and there was no secondary scoring. Chiarelli’s challenge this past summer was to fix it all. The real challenge was doing it with Connor McDavid’s $11.575 million raise.
On the defensive side of the puck, the onus has been placed on Oscar Klefbom and Adam Larsson to have rebound seasons, and Darnell Nurse needed to continue along his upward trend. In other words, no real change of consequence on the back end. Given the age of those top three defenders and the fact that Klefbom was playing hurt last season, it was a safe bet to expect them to be better. Sekera’s August Achilles tear was an unfortunate situation that occurred far too late in the off-season to have expected Chiarelli to find an equivalent replacement. The reality is that any time a player is injured, his replacement is not as good. That has hurt the Oilers so far, but that’s another article for another day. The defence group is basically the same one that led the Oilers to the playoffs in 2016-17. They are not the biggest problem facing the current Oilers.
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That problem is in the forward group. The lack of secondary scoring was the concern last season. Chiarelli signed Tobias Rieder with the hope that he would play a complementary scoring role in the top 9. He also signed Kyle Brodziak to anchor the 4th line and to kill penalties. Rieder can kill penalties too. Alex Chiasson was brought in on a PTO. He can score and kill penalties as well. With three small free agent signings, Chiarelli had added some depth scoring and a lot of penalty killing. However, secondary scoring has still been a concern this season. Rieder had contributed 7 assists in 18 games played before getting hurt, but no goals. Chiasson has been a revelation. He is 3rd on the team in goal scoring with 11. Brodziak was never meant to be a scoring threat, and that has proven itself to be true so far.
Chiarelli has made two in-season moves to address the secondary scoring so far. He shipped out under-performing centre Ryan Strome for under-performing centre/winger Ryan Spooner. This was essentially a lateral move, but Spooner also hasn’t produced thus far (in a small sample size). The other was Friday’s waiver claim: Valentin Zykov from the Carolina Hurricanes. Zykov led the AHL in goal scoring last season with 33 goals. He had 7 points in 10 games in Carolina at the end of last season on a line with Sebastian Aho and Teuvo Teravainen, but he could only muster 3 points in 13 games with Carolina this season.
A closer look at these acquisitions brings “the plan” to light.
Zykov is 23 years old. Spooner is 26. Rieder is 25. Chiasson is 28. These wingers are all either younger than or right at the typical peak of an NHL player, which is 27-28 years old. It’s like playing the stock market. You buy a stock BEFORE it reaches its peak value in order to gain from its growth. The idea here is that one of these young wingers will build on his achievements in his young career thus far and produce at a higher level. Chiarelli wants the Oilers to benefit from the anticipated increase in production from one or more of these young wingers. Chiarelli has cashed in on the Chiasson bet. He still needs at least one more of these bets to hit.
“The plan” for this season has been to…
Click this link to head over to Edmonton Oil Drops to read what “The Plan” for this season has always been.
