Bad decisions. Terrible instincts. A refusal to learn. These are the things that are killing the Oilers as best as I can tell. They can play with any team in the league for 20 minutes but if you ask for 60 then you’re looking for trouble. There are just too many opportunities to screw up. Too much temptation to try something fancy. And drop passes. So many drop passes. I don’t even make drop passes in video game hockey because that’s how low percentage they are, but the Oilers are in love with them.
Jordan Eberle cut to the middle of the slot with the puck in tow and made a drop pass the other day. I almost chugged my glass of Bleach when I saw that. Who does that? The Oilers, that’s who. The 1st shorty that Tobias Rieder (you might remember him from
this article) scored was on a play that began with a drop pass.
Justin Schultz skated up the ice on the Power Play, the only defenseman on the ice for the Oilers. David Perron stands at the blueline and 3 other Oilers are behind Jultz. The Coyotes are all 4 of them between center ice and their own blue. The center of the ice has a column of Yotes players at 5 second mark of the video.
Instead of moving the puck up to David Perron or continuing to skate to that open spot on the ice, Jultz makes a drop pass 4 feet in front of Center. Eberle is immediately pressured and moves it over past Nugent-Hopkins but behind Hall as a result. At 6 seconds into the video Hall has the puck in his skates and Justin Schultz is lining up on Arizona’s blueline because of course he is.
Hall makes a very weak attempt at the puck where he actually kicks at it. I mean he just sort of waves a foot despite the fact that the Yotes are in great position to deny the zone entry at the very least.
Rieder intercepts.
At the 8 second mark of the video this is what you see from Left to Right: The puck, 2 Coyotes players, 5 Oilers lined up on the blueline, the other 2 Coyotes players.
Hit play on the video. Wait roughly 4 seconds. See Rieder score. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Drop passes into pressure, even on the Power Play, are about as idiotic as you can get while trying to make things happen offensively. And the worst part is nobody learns from these mistakes. Those plays might have worked in Jr or the NCAA but penalty killers in the NHL will pick you apart for making decisions like that.
LINEUP
The Captain is mad. The coach has to be at the end of his rope. Something has to give soon. The Oilers don’t really have a lot of options right now to change the mix of their roster and everybody is relatively healthy. Aside from Hendricks this is a Healthy club by NHL standards. One of the things that gets mentioned a lot right now is that there is no cavalry coming. The Oil arent this bad because theyre missing key guys. Everyone is present. Mixing up the lines might be a good idea but it wont amount to much right now. And boy did Eakins go Full MacBlender on this one.
Hall RNH Pitlick
Perron Gordon Purcell
Yak Draisaitl Eberle
Gazdic Arco Pinizzotto
Klefbom Petry
Nikitin Fayne
Ference Schultz
Scrivens
OILERS KEYS TO THE GAME
1) Smarten Up. It’s not that mistakes are made. It’s that the player who makes them refuses to learn from them. Bad turn-over after bad turn-over keeps happening. There’s no growth in defensive awareness it seems. No NHL level Spidey Sense that warns the player that he’s about to put the puck in a bad spot. Is it an attitude problem or a Hockey IQ problem?
2) Please let whomever is in net stop at least 90% of the shots he faces. All you really need to have a chance to win is .900 or higher in a game. Obviously you want the average to be higher since .910 is NHL backup level goaltending, but even just .900 in a single game is enough to win with. Fasth was .792 in the last game. Scrivens has only been at or above .900 in 5 of his last 10 games. Help! (Note this ominous tweet from Bob Stauffer)
NOTE: Pierre LeBrun is reporting now that Bryz is getting a shot with the Ducks
3) Play On The Edge. There arent many teams who have worse Power Plays than the Oil do right now but Winnipeg is one of them. Their efficiency is currently at 12% while Edmonton’s is towering over them at a whopping 12.5%. If they wont punish you on the PP then why not take advantage by playing the game on the edge. Take a few extra jabs after the whistle. Bring the rough stuff. It might even be fun, you never know.
Puck drops at 7:08PM Mountain Time on Sportsnet and/or Sportsnet One. Game On!
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