Imagine next week the Oilers are giving you the chance to become the next general manager of the Edmonton Oilers. What moves would you make? What changes would you institute to ensure that the Oilers would be a playoff team in 2018/19? Would you keep the coaching staff? Would you keep the old Oilers that have random positions throughout the organization?
It’s an interesting exercise and one that I haven’t really tackled head on this year but with 2 games left in the season, I think that it’s as good as time as any to pontificate upon before the real changes are made (IF they are made).
AS GM
We need to first determine what went wrong this in 2017/18 and in my opinion, those things are thus:
- Health
- Special Teams/Coaching
- Goaltending
- Lack of good puck moving defensemen
- No shoot-first wingers
- Not enough compete in the bottom 6 (I’m gonna take some flack for this one)
Let’s start at the top, Health.
As GM I can only suggest that players be mindful of the way they live and be honest with any current ailments so that the team can do its best to help the player so that the player can help the team. I think of Klefbom this year, I think of Cam Talbot, and I think of Leon Draisaitl.
This past season players playing through minor injuries or coming back early during recovery backfired for the Oilers and I’d try to do my best to prevent that.
The way to prevent that is to not spend your resources on AHL vets and to do a bit better with the free agent signings during the summer but that doesn’t mean we should be reckless but we should be shrewd.
Going into 2018/19, the Oilers have a shade under $18M (IF the cap goes to $80M) according to capfriendly. Now that’s with 32/50 players under contract and that’s w/o the likes of Darnell Nurse, Drake Caggiula, Matt Benning, Iiro Pakarinen, and Anton Slepyshev signed.
I don’t want to get right into the nitty-gritty during this exercise and so I defer to respected blogger Lowetide for his projections because I believe they are close to actual.
So that’s $3M to play with IF we don’t make a trade and the thing with a trade now is that we’re sort of back to square one like we were in the summer of ’16. Every GM knows or thinks they know, that we’re behind the 8-ball.
Another thing to consider is what happens at the draft if we win the lottery and get a top-3 pick. That $3M is gonzo if that happens because Dahlin, Svechnikov, Zadina, or Tkachuk will be on the opening day roster.
Now I look at that roster above and I have to ask myself if that is a roster that IF healthy can compete in the Pacific division? Can this team make it past the Anaheims, the San Joses, the LAs, or possibly the Vegas’? Because if we can dominate this division that’s half the battle towards making the playoffs and that’s my bottom line. I don’t care where my team ends up in the standings as long as it is in a playoff spot come April. Now if it is a roster that could boss the Pacific, we can sit on the $3M because with the additions of Kailer Yamamoto, Tyler Benson, Ostap Safin, and possibly Tyler Vesel to our AHL team; there are some players there that could help out in a pinch.
But if I wanted to spend a bit of that $3M, I’d probably look at players like Chris Kunitz, Antoine Vermette, Derek Ryan, or possibly Ales Hemsky or Matt Hendricks. I’d want to fill out that bottom 6 with experience and glue. It’d be less about goals and more about team cohesiveness. I also put emphasis on faceoffs and work ethic hence Vermette and Hendricks.
Addressing special teams and coaching would be a daunting task. I think a lot of the poor special teams is on the coaching staff. In 2017/18 they shit the bed, to put it bluntly. The PK has been less-than-stellar since the season previous and got worse. The PP has the best player on the planet on it and can’t seem to get going. Turrible!
I’d like to keep Todd McLellan because I think he’s a capable coach but I’m not sure if this young squad is the right one for him and vice versa. He’s built his career coaching veteran-laden squads as an assistant under Babcock in Detroit during their golden years and in San Jose. The assistants did more to tell me they’d like to coach elsewhere than in Edmonton, so I’m happy to move on from them.
But this is where things get complicated. Who do you pick to come in and take over?
I know everyone wants offense-first hockey but I don’t think that’s what I’d want. I’d want a coach who preaches defense first and teaches my players how to grind down a team and win the 1-goal games. McDavid is going to get his points, don’t worry about that and he’ll still be as electrifying as ever but my boys had better be on the right side of the puck when it matters. Offense-first hockey hasn’t worked in Edmonton since Gretzky was part of the club.
So my options there are probably Darryl Sutter or Dave Tippett. I’m okay with either and I think I can get them for under the $6M a year that Quenneville makes. Selfishly I’d love to have a more prickly coach just to see how he’d deal with the fishbowl that is Edmonton but I’m not sure how successful the club would be with that kind of coach.
Now, does the team NEED a right-handed cannon for the PP? I mean Matt Benning has a 100+MPH slapshot but I’m not sure about his offensive potential there… Or could we simply get the players to be better net-front presences? I’ve watched Leon Draisaitl’s one-timer from the right-wall look pretty effective this year too.
I still think that Ryan Strome from the left-wall could be useful as a one-time option as well as a healthy Oscar Klefbom on the point and the aforementioned Leon Draisaitl on the right wall. That unit would need a screen (Kassian/Khaira/Caggiula?) and another down low player probably being McDavid.
The 2nd unit would be Nuge’s and that would consist of Benning/Bear on the point, Puljujarvi on the left-wall, Slepyshev as the bumper, Nuge on the right-wall, and Aberg as the down low. Everything would be run through the point shot or Puljujarvi and Slepy/Jesse/Aberg could be fluid with who goes where. They’re all RH’d and all can shoot.
The one thing that absolutely MUST be eradicated from the PP is the feet in quicksand. The Oilers do not move their feet enough on the PP and it makes it so easy to defend against. I want a coaching staff that will hold the players accountable and get rid of this poor habit once and for all and the players who don’t think they’re capable of that, we’ll move on from them.
On to the goaltending. I actually don’t think there’s too much we could do here for the next season. I like the tandem of Talbot and Montoya but they MUST be healthy to start the year because that was the problem this season and it killed the team’s confidence. No messing about. If there’s a lingering issue, it must be dealt with accordingly. I wouldn’t be playing the “will it get worse if he plays with it” game.
I am a bit concerned about the lack of good puck-moving dmen though. The problem being it’ll be very hard to acquire one without moving a core piece (RNH/Klef) or a highly-regarded prospect (Yamamoto/Puljujarvi) and I’m not willing to move on them. I like Chris Wideman, a righty UFA who played for Ottawa the last few years, and I still like Auvitu as long as he has the right partner but with only $3M in cap room, I would not be willing to blow most of that on a puck-moving D right now.
That being said, if Sekera has done his knee in for good, that might make it possible to put him on LTIR and open up some space to bring in someone assuming that we don’t draft somebody like Rasmus Dahlin, Adam Boqvist, or Quinn Hughes.
Otherwise, we have to wait another year in order to be able to trade Kris Russell or Andrej Sekera or else we’ll have to pay another team to take those players. A more severe option would be to buy a player out…
The last two problems from this past season, no shoot-first wingers and a lack of compete in the bottom-6, will have to be addressed internally, by choosing not to re-sign some of those RFAs from above, or by trade.
*What I mean by lack of compete is that this past season I’ve watched the club stop competing altogether at times. It reminded me of the Hall years and pissed me off. I’m a guy that believes if you’re not scoring you’d better be doing something else to affect the game. Now, that doesn’t mean you have to go running around but I do want to see some intensity through the forecheck or an open-ice hit or some scrums at the net. Do something to get the other team off their game. Anaheim are fantastic at it.*
My conundrum with the bottom-6 and the lack of shooters on the wing though is that there were games where Slepyshev and Caggiula were bringing the most jam to the game but nothing was going. So I know they can compete and I really believe that Anton Slepyshev can score in the double-digits the same way Drake Caggiula did this past year but I’m not sure who you’d put them with in order to do that? They’re skilled and bring the sandpaper and they can skate but do they require an elite centre to produce?
The problem is that this team, for the most part, is young and their game is inconsistent. We’re going through the bumps in the road with them right now and those will smooth as time passes on but we should be in win-now mode so are some of these players expendable, right? And the players we want to bring in are more expensive, something the team cannot afford right now… Conundrum.
It sort of brings us to Zack Kassian. I feel like he and Lucic were challenged to play a more skill game this season and that backfired too. I also think that the brutal PK had them being a bit more choosy about how they play too. But that’s not where their bread and butter is. They are power forwards and their mandate would be to play as such. But if that wasn’t something they were interested in, I’d gladly move on from them just from a financial perspective, their contracts are ones that the team could do without but from a team cohesiveness perspective, I want them around.
Edmonton is a blue-collar city and they should be playing a blue-collar game accented with skill.
The team has been handcuffed, for lack of a better term, by Chiarelli but it’s not a bottom-10 team any more than Vegas is the next great NHL dynasty. The Oilers were obliterated by slumps, health, poor coaching/special teams, and a lack of effective depth players to cover said slumps and injuries.
That will all begin to change in 2018/19 as the AHL team starts to populate with draft picks from 2015 and 2016 in my opinion.
Anyways, the exercise is over. I’m sure I’ve glossed over some things and I encourage you to let me know what they are in the comments below!
Thanks for reading!
