Edmonton Oilers Talk: Bill Burr, Off-Ice Officials, Keith/Ceci, and the Latest NHL Rumors!

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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Oilersnation

Friedman: “McDavid deserves many, many more calls against him than he gets”

Friedman is bang-on with the sentiment about Tortorella’s comments making for bad television. The NHL has found itself in a good spot with games being aired on ESPN, the United States’ largest sports network, for the first time in years. Having a former coach say that the league’s top player needs to shut up and keep his head down isn’t at all interesting or entertaining analysis.
There are plenty of players around the league who have a valid gripe about not having penalties called on them, but McDavid is at the top of the list. The fact that McDavid, who logs 22:34 per game and has the puck on his stick more often than he doesn’t, has drawn fewer penalties this season than Philadelphia Flyers defenceman Nick Seeler is insane.
“The question I’d be asking if I was the NHL is this: if we want to get more people into the building, are we going to have to give our fans reason to believe star talents will be given more of an opportunity to succeed?” – Elliotte Friedman

BLH’s Thoughts: ESPN should hire a guy like comedian Bill Burr, who is a MASSIVE Boston Bruins fan and knows the game, because he’d be a great foil for John Tortorella. You put other hockey guys on there and there’s too much respect being given to the former coaches and players. Burr wouldn’t have it and watching him go at Tortorella for such a shit take would be of the utmost hilarity.

I’ll tell you what needs to be done about the missed calls on the league’s stars and a lot of people won’t like it. There needs to be somebody sitting upstairs with the ability to communicate with the referees or the time box officials and when a call is missed, the game is stopped. Simple as that.

Now, that might slow down the flow of the game but only temporarily until the refs stop being game managers and start doing their jobs correctly.

This is what is done in professional soccer to an extent. If there’s an infraction behind the play that the ref doesn’t catch, the linesmen can “buzz” the referee and the match stops, then the two officials have a chat and a judgement call is made.

If the men in stripes on the ice can’t do their job, maybe a level of overseeing is required as a bit of incentive.

Edmonton Sun

Edmonton Oilers’ record is admirable but have underlying concerns

They always say you are what your record says you are, so the Edmonton Oilers are an 11-4 hockey team with a .733 winning percentage, only bested by Carolina and Florida through the first month of NHL games.
They average four goals a game, No. 1. They play pitch and catch on their power play, scoring for fun with 20 in their 15 games, and their PK is No. 5 in the league.
They’re chasing too many games. They’ve given up the first goal in nine of their 15, all five games of the just completed road-trip. That is not a recipe for success.
At 5-on-5, they’re an ordinary NHL team, actually outscored 36-34. And 45 to 48
minutes out of every 60 is commonly spent at even-strength.
They’ve surrendered 47 goals, actually only five fewer than the COVID-riddled Ottawa Senators at 4-10-1.
They’re in the bottom third in goals allowed at 3.13 a game. Twenty teams are giving up fewer than that a night.
They’re averaging 33.6 shots against a game.
Draisaitl is on an unbelieveable heater with his 17 goals on his last 44 shots… No active NHL player has ever scored more than 15 goals in their first 15 games. Best is Alex Ovechkin, David Pastrnak and Auston Matthews (15 in 15).
(Derek) Ryan is winning 57.4 per cent of his face-offs, a good thing, but is now the fourth-line C, buried five-on-five with goals against (-10). He has an estimable career 53.7 Corsi at even-strength and he’s 47.5 now. He has one point and 15 shots in 15 games.
Foegele has two points (assists) in his last eight games and only six shots. He’s -7. He’s normally 53.6 Corsi, and he’s 50.8.
Kassian has eight shots in his 11 games.
There is no defined fourth line…
Koskinen was lights-out in the win in St. Louis with half a dozen 10-alarm bell saves, but that early one to Adam Lowry in Winnipeg that leaked through him on the game’s first shot from distance? Not good.
The second defence pairing of Duncan Keith and Cody Ceci, excellent early and tasked with an abundance of defensive-zone starts, is starting to show some cracks.

BLH’s Thoughts: So, I do remember somebody saying to scale back the enthusiasm when this team was 9-1-0 because November was going to be a different story… I wonder who that was? Sounds like a smart hockey fan.

So Duncan Keith is playing about two minutes too much according to Matheson and that would explain why Edmonton might be looking for a left-shot defender. Now, the question is, are they looking for a 20-minute/night guy or are they looking for somebody more dependable to play on the third pair?

With Mikko, despite his record and early season stats, he’s not a true no.1 goalie and with that, the expectations being heaved upon his shoulders by the fans (and the coaching staff, frankly) are too much. He’s showing signs of fatigue in my opinion and it’s about time Coach Tippett started to show some faith in Stuart Skinner because he needs the reps and Koskinen needs the rest.

It’s funny, for all of the radio guys and newspaper men in Edmonton who watch the practices, I’m surprised we never hear about the weak ones he lets in during those morning sessions… You’d think that’d be the first place where fatigue-related mistakes would start to appear…

Spector’s Hockey

THE ATHLETIC: Pierre LeBrun reports the Colorado Avalanche isn’t interested in shopping Samuel Girard. The 23-year-old defenseman is in the second season of a seven-year contract with an affordable $5 million annual average value.
NEW YORK POST: Larry Brooks examined what the Rangers could do to address the loss of forward Sammy Blais to a season-ending knee injury… Brooks wondered if they could interest the Los Angeles Kings in a swap of Kravtsov’s rights for recently demoted center Gabriel Vilardi.