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Re: Review: Vegas @ Edmonton (Game #6) [message #823804 is a reply to message #823781 ]	Fri, 19 May 2023 15:10

Adam
Messages: 6804
Registered: August 2005
Location: Edmonton, AB

6 Cups

RDOilerfan wrote on Fri, 19 May 2023 12:26

Serious question. Can you ever have a discussion about anything Oilers related without going on a rant about the management being bad?

I am not here to get into it with you again. I get it, you don't like the management and never will. Whoever takes over from Hollands next, season, you probably would like him either. I do like this kind of stuff, the hypothetical trade and signing stuff but what is the point of engaging in a discussion when it's just going to be another management sucks rant?

This is a pretty argumentative first position if you don't want to get in to it.

It's worth noting that the reason the Oilers have dark days approaching and the possibility of Draisaitl and McDavid ending the Edmonton era of their careers without any championships to show for their time here is because the management has been so thoroughly incompetent.

I don't even really think that is a controversial position. Draisaitl was drafted by MacTavish, who floundered around as a GM. He made a lot of moves, but rarely seemed able to point the team in the right direction. He fired a coach by Zoom, he hired Eakins for a role he didn't even interview him for, he managed to devalue three of his key players before he'd even had his team play a single game with him as general manager. He put Draisaitl in the league before he was ready, and allowed him to be healthy scratched a dozen or so times before finally sending him back to junior, while bragging that he had twisted the arm of his junior team to send him to a destination of MacT's choosing - how he figured that intelligence was likely to help the Oilers, I'll never understand.

After destroying the value of his Horcoff, Hemsky and Dubnyk in his first year, he promptly set out to destroy his entire right side defence too with the Petry debacle, and then pushing forward Schultz in to a role he wasn't suited for leading to his value erosion and eventual exit. He eventually had to fire Eakins after one and a half incredibly bad seasons, but felt he couldn't just hire a new coach - rather he had to take the unprecedented step of co-coaching 6 games with Nelson.

His signings were generally terrible. He made a lot of trades, but really only two of them look any good - Paajarvi for Perron and Perron for the draft pick that became Matthew Barzal...

Oh, that leads us to McDavid's first GM - Panicky Pete Chiarelli. Chia came in with a plan. He hired a veteran coach, he drafted McDavid first overall as planned, he traded for a goalie in Talbot and then he tried to trade for Dougie Hamilton to be the cornerstone of the Edmonton defence. It was a great plan, other than the Bruins not wanting to give him Hamilton. That's fine - any good plan has some contingencies, right? Well, it's fine so long as they don't give two high draft picks away for a minor league defenceman (who fellow incompetent Tambellini and scouts considered taking #1 overall in 2012). Even with that staggering gaffe, the first season shows lots of promise. McDavid is clearly the real deal. Hall clicks immediately with Draisaitl and they put up really solid numbers. Health is the issue as McDavid, Eberle, Nugent-Hopkins, Purcell, Pouliot, Klefbom and Yakupov all miss substantial time due to injuries.

There's clearly some need to bolster the defence still, since it turned out that Reinhart wasn't an adequate replacement for Hamilton after all. Sure would have been nice to have a right shot D like Petry, or even Justin Schultz around...Nikitin and Gryba aren't quite the replacements one might have thought they'd be. No problem - the team has a high draft pick and lots of prospects. We should be able to acquire a decent defenceman for that right - I mean, after all, look at the price Calgary had to pay for Hamilton only a year earlier. Or, we could trade our leading scorer away for a defensive defenceman, sign a 29-year old power forward primed for decline, sign the worst goalie in the league as our back-up and then cross our fingers that it all works out!

Chiarelli's tenure is marked by terrible trade after terrible trade. They KNEW that the trades would be unpopular. They knew that the stats didn't support them. Rather than not doing trades that everyone would know were bad, they decided instead to try to coax media guys to cover for them and insist that the sky really is green.

Which brings us to Holland. Hugely over-rated after a career that saw him piggyback on teams with massive budgets to Stanley Cup wins over 20 years ago (and one late one in 2008 on the backs of a couple Hall of Fame players), Holland superceded a hiring process that saw our forensic auditor-in-chief Nicholson declare the need for an actual hiring process complete with real interviews of actual identified candidates. He went so far as to embarrass the entire franchise by begging other GMs to tell him what they think he should do at the league meetings. Fortunately those bought-and-paid stooge media guys were there to proclaim this a master strategy. Apparently, one of those GMs told him he should just hire Holland who was in the process of being pushed out in Detroit, where he'd taken the once proud team slowly in to the gutter. A quick look at his draft picks will show you he'd done a piss poor job there for over a decade. A look at his trade record shows about as well, other than one where he got three picks for an over-rated UFA to be. Of course, if you suck at drafting, having a bunch of extra picks isn't quite the benefit it might otherwise be.

Once here, he spent the first three years signing bad deals and making sure that our goaltending consistently sucked, while constantly trying to lower expectations of results. When he did make trades, he tended to get fleeced and repeatedly has shown that he doesn't understand cap mechanics, the loopholes other teams access, or about relative strength in bargaining. He does like fondly reminiscing on his days in Detroit, and telling people his philosophy and plans in great detail...and proving to them all that he was serious by just never doing anything surprising at all. He meekly accepts it when McDavid and Draisaitl are constantly mugged, never risking a fine by making a peep. He meekly accepts it when the league decides that the only thing that needs pro-rating in the Covid-shortened season is James Neal's results, so he's forced to give up an extra draft pick to Calgary, which they select at almost the same time he's buying out the same player. When the league goes back on their own rules to invalidate a cap benefit the Oilers would receive because of the godsent retirement of Duncan Keith - a benefit other teams have previously used when players like Luongo retired - once again it's meek acceptance. I mean, the guy doesn't even loudly condemn racists targeting one of his players after our first round loss to Winnipeg a couple years ago, instead just trying to say he doesn't know what it's about because he doesn't have social media.

He's decided now that he doesn't really like rentals - which ties his hands at the trade deadline because all the players you can get for relative bargains at that point are the guys who's contracts are expiring. Everyone else understands that, but it means that in 2021-22, he was only willing to shop the bottom of the market, getting Kulak and Brassard. He did explain prior to the trade deadline that he wasn't sure if we were in our "window" yet...so it must have been a surprise to him to see us go all the way to the semi-finals. Maybe if we'd had a little more support from management and he'd gotten a better goalie or done some more at the deadline we'd have been in better shape...I'm sure he'll do better next year right?

Nope - old dog, new tricks and all. We still have mediocre goaltending and while he makes his best move as Oilers GM in acquiring Ekholm, he packs it in early and stops even trying to improve the team. Turns out it still has plenty of holes and we're on the outside looking in again.

Who thinks he's going to fix the goaltending this summer? Anyone believe he's going to push all-in next year at the trade deadline? Who has confidence he's going to make trades and signings that meaningfully improve the team? Anyone believe he's got the savvy to manage the cap and look at using any loopholes?

Why do I talk about management when talking about what ails the Oilers? It's because management - consistent, disastrous management - is what's sunk the Oilers since Glen Sather left, other than one brilliant year in 2006 from Kevin Lowe. We're out of the playoffs today because our GM failed to recognize and address the flaws in his roster. Management is the problem - thus if we're doing any debrief, they probably SHOULD come up.

Or I suppose we could just claim that it's all because Nuge didn't get a couple more ES points...

"Thinking that a bad team's best players are the reason the team is bad is the "Tambellini re-signing Lennart Petrell" of sports opinions." @Woodguy55
~~#FireLowe~~ #FireBobbyNicks #FireKenHolland #FireKeithGretzky