This is your TL/DR (too long, didn’t read) summary post where excerpts are taken from the best of the best when it comes to Edmonton Oilers blogs. BLH gives you his two cents on the latest posts being published in the Oilogosphere! Including those from Lowetide.ca, The Athletic, Oilersnation, The Cult of Hockey, Copper N Blue, Oil on Whyte, and more!
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The Athletic
Ethan Bear is rising above and thinking big: ‘I wanted to make a difference’
- It seemed likely to him that he’d be dealt as the free-agent period began on July 28.
- That day, Oilers general manager Ken Holland called Bear into his office to deliver the news. He’d been traded to Carolina for winger Warren Foegele. Bear appreciated how it was handled. He didn’t want to leave Edmonton — “asking for a trade is not my thing; I’d rather work my way out of a situation”
- … last season didn’t go according to plan. He was a restricted free agent and trained in Kelowna, B.C., rather than under the watch of the Oilers training staff in Edmonton. He signed just before training camp started.
- “I didn’t expect for it to wait that long,” Bear says. “Details and my routine are so important to me. Having that be late and trying to train, it was really hard on me mentally. It felt like I wasn’t important.
- The Oilers returned to Edmonton. With end-of-season meetings and players ready to go their separate ways for the summer, team camaraderie wasn’t running high.
- “The one thing that sucked is I didn’t feel like I had much support when it happened,” he says. “It was such a weird thing to go through, and it just felt like I was alone.”
BLH’s Thoughts: There two things that folks are making a deal out of in this piece.
- Bear says he didn’t ask for a trade.
- His teammates didn’t reach out after Edmonton was eliminated by Winnipeg in last year’s playoffs.
Edmonton’s core seems like the kind of group that you have to earn your way into, doesn’t it? Then again, Evan Bouchard was kinda welcomed right in. I wonder if Dylan Holloway will get in that easy too. But for others like Bear, Jones, Puljujarvi, I’m not sure if Lucic was part of it when he was playing for the Oilers…
It really seems like there’s some exclusivity in that locker room when you hear things like what Bear said about not being contacted after the year. Then again, we’re not in the locker room. It’s possible that Ethan didn’t rub folks the right way too. Not sure how that even happens with such a mature and polite young man, but you never know. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are some competitive guys…
The Alphas might’ve put their foot down which leads to my next point.
Do you think Bear was really 100% against the idea of being traded considering his team’s leadership core, who include Connor McDavid, Darnell Nurse, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and Leon Draisaitl, never reached out to see how he was doing after last game of the year?
Back in July, he said talked about the situation in Edmonton in an interview with Rob Tychkowski,
“Everything I had to go through last year, it would have been pretty tough to push through it and battle all the adversity I would have had to deal with in Edmonton.”
Yet, he says in this post,
“…asking for a trade is not my thing; I’d rather work my way out of a situation”
As well as,
“I don’t know how I would have survived going through all that again.”
So, don’t you get the feeling that he didn’t exactly want to stick around? Things weren’t going well with the coaches, he felt abandoned to a degree with regards to his contract negotiations, and in my mind, the experience he went through soured him on the Edmonton market and the fanbase.
He totally wanted out. C’mon… He said in that Tychkowski interview that playing in Edmonton was “pretty stressful” and in another with The Athletic, he wasn’t worried about leaving Edmonton behind. He was well within his right to ask for a trade out but being the honorable young man he is, he was going to try and stick it out.
Now, I’m not angling my thoughts in order to point a finger at Bear and call him a liar or anything like that, I’m really just talking to those folks who have it set in their minds that keeping Bear in Edmonton would’ve been the right thing to do. Maybe that would’ve been the worst thing to do…
The way that it was explained to me is that what we heard via the main stream media isn’t the whole story and things were much much worse and therefor Ken Holland was doing this young man and his future fiancée a favor by moving them to greener pastures.
The bigger question that nobody has asked yet is why didn’t Edmonton’s leadership core, the coaching staff, or management reach out to Ethan to see how he was doing before all the shit hit the fan?
I’m happy that life is better for Bear and his family now. I’m not sure if he’ll play tonight because he’s coming off of a bout with The ‘Vid and he wasn’t feeling it against Calgary so he didn’t play there. I’d love to see him play though and I think the fans in Edmonton would show him how much they miss him.
I do have a bone to pick with those that are pumping Bear’s tires though. He’s getting 5/6 minutes in CAR, his PDO is 103.4, and the Hurricanes system really helps their skaters’ fancies.
Ethan spends a lot of time with TEAM USA stud Jaccob Slavin. Here are Bear’s numbers with and without Slavin.
CF/60 FF/60 SF/60 GF/60 xGF/60 Together 2.31 3.55 4.96 1.75 2.88 Bear w/o Slaavin 0.19 -1.85 -3.48 -16.67 -3.02 Slaavin w/o Bear 2.65 4.13 3.55 13.33 9.08 Good Christ! I can see why Rod the Bod keeps these two together… Bear has been an absolute train wreck away when played away from the team’s best defenseman.
Isn’t that weird? You’d think the fancy stat guys would look at that and say Bear is really dragging Slavvin’s numbers down or that Slaavin is pumping Bear’s up in such a massive fashion that it’s kinda hard to take those metrics seriously.
Well, either way, when it comes down to brass tacks, the Oilers chose Evan Bouchard and I think that was the right choice for the short-term and the long.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqhUwN0fuVA
Oilersnation
Oilers Must Reduce the Soft Plays
- The same scene has unfolded time and time again with the Oilers in 2021.
- They continue to self-implode. They make soft plays at crucial moments and it costs them games.
- Edmonton controlled the game last night just like they did against the Wild on Tuesday. But they can’t stop shooting themselves in the foot with egregious mental and physical mistakes.
- It has been the Oilers weakness for some time. I’m not sure how it gets fixed, other than a commitment to increase focus, execution and attention to detail at key times.
- I’m not sure it is a system issue. If it was the Oilers wouldn’t have outshot and out-chanced the Jets those games.
- The coaches and players need to have some tough-love conversations within the dressing room.
BLH’s Thoughts: On Friday’s Jason Gregor Show, Jason Strudwick figured it was a team maturity issue and maybe it is. The Oilers have been running a pretty young defense lately. Strudwick also mentioned that Bouchard MUST get more physical with players in his own zone. He can’t just allow them to walk out of the corner to set up the GWG against. In the young defender’s defense though, Struds also brought up how they used to say the same thing about Nurse when he was young… So we’re back to the peaks and valleys conversation again…
I don’t know how many unforced errors Edmonton’s skaters have committed that have gone on to go into their net. But that first goal against Minny was on Darnell Nurse in my mind. Why didn’t he plow Eriksson-Ek out of the way? This is a $9M/yr defenseman starting in 2022… He was trying to stick check the Wild forward like it was Atom hockey…
Those kinds of errors are annoying. When a guy as big as Darnell doesn’t use his physicality effectively and it costs his team, I can’t stand it. Reckon Nikita Zadorov or Erik Gudbranson down in Cowtown would’ve stick checked somebody standing on the doorstep? Highly doubtful… $9M/yr… Woof.
Spector’s Hockey
- NEW YORK POST: Larry Brooks asks if the Rangers should attempt to acquire Chicago Blackhawks winger Patrick Kane if they could get a third team involved to make the salary-cap dollars work. Kane, 33, has a year remaining on his contract with a $10.5 million annual cap hit.
- “Would you get Kane if it cost you Kaapo Kakko (but not Alexis Lafreniere), Nils Lundkvist (or Zac Jones or Matthew Robertson but not Braden Schneider), Vitali Kravtsov (but not Will Cuyelle or Brennan Othmann) and a 2022 first-rounder?”
- BOSTON HOCKEY NOW:Joe Haggerty cites NHL analyst Mike Milbury suggesting the Bruins need to move on from captain Patrice Bergeron during a recent appearance on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show”.
- ESPN.COM: Emily Kaplan reports Blackhawks interim general manager Kyle Davidson and his staff are still evaluating their club and haven’t yet decided on their plan for the team. That includes goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, who’s slated to become an unrestricted free agent next July.
