On November 28th, 2020, Dan Rosen and Tim Campbell from NHL.com released their Edmonton Oilers 2020-21 season preview vlog, and with it came some hot taeks that are sure to tug at the nips of a few Oilers fans.
If you’d like to watch the video, you can find it at the end of this post.
DR – Dan Rosen
TC – Tim Campbell
DR: Last year the Oilers… Individually, they had a good year, right? Leon Draisaitl was the Hart winner. Even in the regular season before it was shortened, they had 83pts and a .585 points percentage. They were a solid team. Then they ran into the qualifiers, the Chicago Blackhawks who knocked them out in four. What kind of impact has that had on the Edmonton Oilers?
TC: That’s the million dollar question. The entire off-season for Edmonton, they looked, last season, like they were building something really cool. I mean, Draisaitl eclipsing Connor McDavid, if you can imagine it, for the scoring championship and the Hart Trophy and a lot of attention around the NHL. Connor McDavid, by no account, had a poor season last year.
I got the sense they were getting their act together… New coach Dave Tippett. New GM Ken Holland. The whole reset thing was kind of taking hold and it looked to be very optimistic in Edmonton. The got it to March with their own fate in their hands for the playoffs and then the pause and the return to play, it was just not their thing. They struggled from day 1. They lost the first game against the Chicago Blackhawks in the qualifiers and they were in panic mode from there on and they wound up losing the series in four games with close games all through.
Where do the Oilers come out of this or how do they come out of this? That, I can’t tell you for sure. Ken Holland has been kind of restricted in his dealing with the roster in the off-season with the cap crunch. They were tight to the cap and they have some longer term issues, they’ve got some buyout people that they’re still paying and he’s got another year to go here before he’s got any flexibility at all. So he’s only been able to tinker around the edges, more or less, with the Oilers roster to try to help them going forward.
DR: One signing looks great, in particular. The Tyson Barrie signing, right? I mean, a one-year deal and he’s your powerplay quarterback and this was the best powerplay in the league last season at 29.5% but it was a necessary signing, right Tim? Because Oscar Klefbom, who was playing 25 minutes-a-night, he’s having shoulder surgery and might be done for the whole year. So Barrie is just kind of a replacement there for Klefbom, he’s not necessarily an addition.
TC: You’re right. Klefbom looks like he’s going to miss, if not most of the season, then all of the season and to me though, it’s a good contract for both sides. Barrie is on a short rope for one year. It’s a better prove-it-now kind of contract and the Oilers couldn’t really afford any more, term or cash there. So I think he’ll help that powerplay. Oscar, with his shoulder issues in the past couple of seasons, he’s got a good shot from the point, but he’s been more of a reluctant shooter. Teams are smart, they scout, they know. And Edmonton’s powerplay, more or less, last year was no.1 in the league without a real threat from the point. I think Tyson Barrie could fit in there nicely and look at the tools they’ve got that can score goals and make plays there. It’s a high bar for Edmonton to reach to no.1 in the league, but if they’re not in the top-5 on the powerplay in the league again this season, there’ll be some kind of investigation.
DR: Barrie wasn’t the only one. They did sign Kyle Turris, who will be in a much better position with Edmonton than he was with Nashville playing behind McDavid and Draisaitl as the no.3 center. That allows Ryan Nugent-Hopkins to continue to play in that top-6, no doubt about it. I like that signing.
What about Puljujarvi? They bring back Jesse Puljujarvi, can he be an impact player for them?
TC: Well, again, it’s kind of the sub-question of the bigger question. How will they come out of the off-season, but this is a really interesting one. I mean, Puljujarvi after he left two seasons ago, said “trade me, I’m not coming back to Edmonton. I didn’t have a good experience here.” And then Ken Holland was hired and Dave Tippett was hired and they said to Puljujarvi, and I’m just paraphrasing here, “ummm no. This is a new regime. Go ahead, play your season in Finland, but we think you should come back and give us another chance. Things are different now.”
Ken Holland won the day here. He refused to make a trade whether or not he was getting some terrible offers or he just simply refused, we’ll never know, but they’ve convinced Puljujarvi to come back. He’s a little older, he’s got a little bit of confidence now from being a top-scorer in the Finnish league and he won’t have to play top-6 minutes right away. I think he slots in here really nicely to begin with a really smart veteran, that’s Kyle Turris; and we’ll go from there. He’s a big man who can move and the complaint about him before was he didn’t know how to play without the puck. Anybody can shoot, pass, and score, if they make it to the NHL; but Jesse was very poor when the other team had the puck. We’ll see how much progress is made there, but I think there’s some upside of a potentially dangerous top-6 forward in the developing there with Puljujarvi.
DR: So the big question though, is it comes down to the goaltender. Ken Holland was honest about it and he said they’ll need to go out there and get a goalie. Well, they brought back Mike Smith and they still have Mikko Koskinen. They didn’t change there. When you look at the numbers in the qualifiers against the Blackhawks,
- Koskinen – .889 sv% in 3gp
- Smith – .783 sv% in 1gp
So, not good. And how do you think the Oilers, right now, stack up in terms of goaltending and how much of an issue is it, or is it not an issue?
TC: Well, I think it’s going to be an issue. It’s not much of a secret that the Oilers took a stab at Markstrom and they made a pretty substantial offer by many reports, but he decided to go to Calgary. So that changed Edmonton’s outlook immediately on free-agency day and they returned to Mike Smith and Mikko Koskinen.
So, last season it was~… Dave Tippett pretty much deployed a rotation. It was almost always two or three games at a time. It was never one-one-one-one and that seemed to fit these two guys really well. They carried the mail pretty well for Edmonton last year, but based on the ages and based on the contracts, Mikko is, I believe, six or seven years younger than Mike Smith. I think it’s going to have to start to tilt toward Mikko a little bit. They’re going to need two goalies if the season is compressed like many believe. But I think Koskinen is going to have to carry more of the load, sort of value for his contract and eventually, he’s going to have to be the guy.
Whether they can go through another season with the platoon system and make it work, I don’t know the answer to that, but I’ll tell you this, they don’t have any choice right now. This is how it’s going to have to be for at least one more season in Edmonton and they’re just going to have to cross their fingers in many ways.
DR: I think their offense is strong enough to make up for it. That’s why I think they’re a playoff team. Do you think they’re a playoff team?
TC: I think they’re a bubble team and they could probably get in because I don’t see the Pacific being one of the two top divisions in the NHL. Let’s put it that way. I think it’s realistic that they could be the 2nd or 3rd team in the Pacific. They maybe wouldn’t stack up great against other divisions, but I think the competition is going to allow them to get in and I do, personally, still believe they’re still rebuilding. They have the reigning Hart Trophy and possibly the best player on the planet in Connor McDavid and that’s got to count for something.
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