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G1 Jets @ Oilers: Blank Slate |
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Do you have chills? I do. Opening night is upon us and I can’t wait to get this season kicked off. We sat through yet another post season twiddling our thumbs, mowed a lot of grass during the horrible summer months, and directed a thousand beams of positive thought towards Nuge’s shoulder in September. We survived it all and made it back to October.
Now the Oilers are going to welcome the Jets back to the West where they belong. If it’s nostalgia that Jets fans are looking for then a 7-3 drubbing would be right up their alley. But then again maybe it’s best for them if we focus on making new memories instead of digging up any repressed ones they had forgotten about. The new season is all about Blank Slates and the Oilers could not be embracing that fact any more.
Blank Slate
The new Coach and General Manager have come in to figuratively and literally erase the past so the team can start new again. Before ever coaching a single game for the Oilers, Eakins has reshaped his dressing room both in how it looks and the leadership group in it. And while he was removing pictures of Messier from the walls he also removed a veteran or two from the positions they thought they held by default. Eakins is the fresh set of eyes and the new voice that the club has desperately needed.
The Oilers needed someone, an outsider, to snap them from the complacency they feared was going to set in. The team blew through coaches faster than Jarret Stoll blew through composite sticks when he was an Oiler, but Renney wasn’t a new voice when he was hired and neither was Kruger when it was his turn. For Eakins, everything is new and that’s a great thing for this club at this time. The team is in transition and there needed to be a change in the message.
Eakins has no time for the “Young Oilers”, no time for passengers who aren’t capable of delivering what he needs, no time to Rebuild. He is here to win in the present, not some mystical future where the Oilers kids are dominating the league. There is no more talk about teaching and learning on the job, and it’s exactly what the Oil need.
MacTavish has also done his best to exorcise the team of a few demons that seemed to be haunting it. There never appeared to be enough talent to scrape together a competent blueline. The club had 3-4 NHL defensemen but after that it was tenuous at best. While it may not have bothered Tambellini, it was clearly eating away at MacT because almost as soon as he took control he added to the team’s depth in that department. Larsen, Belov, Grebeshkov, and Ference were all brought in to amplify the club’s ability to ice a competent roster. Think about what this season’s outlook would be if we removed those players from the team. What a nightmare!
MacTavish is sick of losing, tired of being “Patient” with the team’s development. The fact is that the Oilers under Tambellini were developing by negligence. Call it “developing naturally” but if you left your child exposed to the elements and did nothing to help them they would call Child Services on you; Do it with a hockey team and all you have to do is say the word “Rebuild” to get off the hook. Thankfully for the Oilers, MacTavish doesn’t believe in building a team that way.
And so here we are on the cusp of a new NHL season with a fresh start for the team, a fresh perspective from the Management and the Coaching staff. The dressing room and accountability are things that belong to them now. Even though the road ahead will be difficult, I still have hope that the right people are in place to push the Oilers back into the playoffs. Then again, maybe we should just take this one game at a time.
Lineups
The Oilers used essentially this same lineup and were spanked by the Dallas Stars’ B squad so they better be more willing to fight for their breaks tonight. The Oilers are going with 6 different Alternate Captains this year: Hall, Eberle, Nugent-Hopkins, Gagner, Smyth, and Nick Schultz. It is definitely a lot of Alternates, but it’s easy to see where the team feels the next wave of leadership is going to come from.
Smyth - Hall - Hemsky
Perron - Arcobello - Eberle
Joensuu - Gordon - Yakupov
Gazdic - Acton - Brown
Ference - J. Schultz
Smid - Petry
N. Schultz - Belov
Dubnyk
The Jets and Claude Noel are opening the NHL season tonight with rookies Mark Scheifele and Jacob Trouba set to play key roles for the team. Trouba looked like a revelation in pre-season and Scheifele is best remembered as not being Sean Couturier.
Ladd - Little - Wheeler
Kane - Scheifele - Setoguchi
Wright - Jokinen - Frolik
Tangradi - Slater - Thorburn
Byfuglien - Entrom
Bogosian - Trouba
Postma - Stuart
Pavelec
Tonight’s game will be broadcast on CBC, puck drops at 8:15PM. Game On!
Do you have chills?
Follow me on Twitter @Archaeologuy
Edmonton Oilers Blogger • 
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