RDOilerfan wrote on Wed, 27 July 2022 10:15

I agree with all of this and like I said, if you get rid of Barrie, then you need to bring back someone else who can fill his spot. Do you need whoever is in Barrie's roster spot to be able to run a PP and put up 40+ pts, of course not. But I am of the belief, the Oilers are in win now mode. So you need good Dmen from 1-6. Barrie is ideally in your 3rd pairing but if someone gets hurt, maybe Bouchard who's still a very young dman, maybe he has a rough patch which happens with young dmen and maybe you need to reduce his role for a short spurt so he gets a reset. Barrie could slide up and do that and give you some good mins. So dumping Barrie to get rid of his cap hit and then bringing in a true #6 might not be a good idea. It's definiately not a good idea to hope a raw rookie in Broberg can flip over to play the right just because he did some in Sweden or the AHL. So I do not think trading Barrie for anything is as easy as some people think. If the Oilers were a team that the expectation is to maybe squeak into the playoffs then you could do that. But I think the expectation is they should be challenging for the division lead, be one of the best teams in the West and pushing for a cup.

Depends I guess what you mean by 'good minutes'.

This is just one aspect, but a pretty important one I think. Barrie's ability to defend the blueline was in the bottom quarter of all defencemen in the playoffs.

And before you dismiss this as, 'analytics', this is literally just counting events, same as they do for hits or shots, and calculating a percent. It's not meant to be definitive by any means, but it's a real description of what actually happened on the ice.

I think his 5x5 minutes are easily replaceable by an average 3rd pairing defenceman, and that savings in cap can be used to ensure that Derek Ryan isn't the Oilers 2nd line RW.



On a positive note, Bretty Kulak actually shows really well here.

https://twitter.com/DimFilipovic/status/1552312254736920576? s=20&t=UQUSKfXcJ8gYzSESPVbEAg

Oilers Goal Differential
17/18: 234 GF / 263 GA (-29)
18/19: 232 GF / 274 GA (-42)
19/20 (82 game pace): 257 GF / 254 GA (+3) in 64 games
2021 (82 game pace):269 GF / 235 GA (+34) after 38 games