Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

"There's no greater springboard to development than failure." - Craig MacTavish, April 13/15.

5-14-6-1

"Sabres think the suck is their ally? They merely adopted the suck. The Oilers were born in it...molded by it."

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

[Updated on: Fri, 19 May 2023 16:56]

McDAVID! Oh YEAH Baby!!
Tic-Tac-Tao!
Keep on Rockin' in the Free World
P. Chiarelli math.. T. Hall = A. Larsson, Yak= bag o'pucks (OK he got one right...) K. Russell = $4.1 M+NMC, G. Reinhart= M. Barzal + A. Beauvillier, J. Eberle = R. Spooner,

Oops - you rightly moved this to a post-mortem thread and I just kept responding over there.

My bad! All my points still stand. I think we have a chance so I don't want to trade Draisaitl yet.

I think our management sucks, and that there's a mountain of evidence for that, so I don't trust them with a quick re-tooling around a Draisaitl trade.

And I think anyone who doesn't understand that management is a huge part of the problem here, likely the biggest problem, has their head firmly in the sand.

"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
#FireBobbyNicks

Skating Analytics/Development Group

In the same vain as Goaltending, I'd also add a group to analyze and evaluate individual skater technique and efficiency/proficiency. Employ advanced hi-tech skating analytical methods, model the player's stride, identify mechanical inefficiencies in skater technique, determine the cause(s) and what the player can do to rectify it. The solutions could be both improved technique and increased strength. This analysis would apply to draft picks as well as current roster players.

From what I understand, all the Oilers have now is D. Pelletier doing skating drills with players.
There is a lot of room to advance this, as a comparison try to imagine the high level of analytics and evaluation used by NCAA football teams with their players, never mind NFL. Oilers could start by checking to see what analytical methods/equipment some of these programs use, and apply it to skating.. maybe even hire them to help create something.. people in their kinesiology departments are likely involved at some level.. both sports likely have some transferable similarities, could be a good head start for an Oiler program, rather than trying to start from scratch.

Again, there is no salary cap on hockey operations, IMH Oilers should maximize its potential benefits.

I've thought about this before.. I remember the one summer Ethan Bear came back and his skating (speed/agility) had improved remarkably, he said he had spent the summer working with D. Pelletier, I wondered then why every Oiler prospect isn't required to do this, it sounded like Bear had to seek out the additional training on his own.. the other case was when Leon came back after a summer of training and his skating speed had improved considerably.. the focused training obviously works, it proves a drafted player's skating is not destined to stay at draft level, it would be great if every players skating abilities were able to be maximized.

This idea was refreshed again this playoffs when I heard an announcer saying during a game that one of the teams had a full time skating development group, and it was responsible for one of the players improving his speed (forget who).. So someone has already thought of it.. Oil need to get ahead of the curve.

IMO a skating development group would pay immense dividends, especially for young prospects. A lot of franchise capital is spent on draft picks, some have the skill and desire, they just need to be a couple of rungs higher in speed and agility.
The cost of the program would be paid back many times if you can manage to get a lower draft pick develop into an NHL level player .. if a pick has high level skill but average speed (lower ranked pick), and you have a skating development system that gets results, you can help maintain a steady supply of young NHL talent coming up on lower ELC's and help manage the cap.

I think the key is to get the players when they are still young and are still able to modify and improve skating mechanics.. gets harder to change as the player gets older when technique becomes burned into the nervous system.

.. just a couple thoughts.


I envision something similar to this.. :)

[Updated on: Sat, 20 May 2023 02:06]

McDAVID! Oh YEAH Baby!!
Tic-Tac-Tao!
Keep on Rockin' in the Free World
P. Chiarelli math.. T. Hall = A. Larsson, Yak= bag o'pucks (OK he got one right...) K. Russell = $4.1 M+NMC, G. Reinhart= M. Barzal + A. Beauvillier, J. Eberle = R. Spooner,

Illegitimi non carborundum.

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

"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
#FireBobbyNicks

CrusaderPi wrote on Sun, 21 May 2023 10:10

100%. I remember when Mark Cuban took over the Mavs he wanted to know what amenities the good clubs had for their players and how much it would cost to get Dallas to that level. Just getting things like nicer chairs in the dressing room and PlayStations on the plane ended up costing ~200k and made the franchise feel less cheap (this is from memory, details are fuzzy). In the current year there’s no reason why the Oilers shouldn’t be sending out nutritionists, skills and condition advisors, and sports therapists out to their players. Hire cooks to feed them (and inspect their pantries). Hire a concierge in kelowna and Muskoka to book ice, tee times, and make sure their phone bills are paid. Just make it easy for the payers to stay out of trouble and in preparation for October.

From what I've read it seems that the Oilers have a lot of nutrition education and consultation covered, What I was thinking was specifically from a mechanics (analytics, evaluation) point of view. There is no reason I player's skating and agility shouldn't be able to improve. Some of it could be by more strength (Crosby does 500# squats for example), but most of it would be via improved stride mechanics.

Pittsburgh actually has a Department of Sports Science and Development (so I'm on the right track), the Director of that department trains McKinnon, Crosby, and Marchand in teh offseason, and has been training McKinnon before juniors. Here's an interesting article.. its McKinnon focused, but you can glean from it that the concept of the analytics of skating mechanics is valuable, and effective.
Article Link: https://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/nathan-mackinnon-colorad o-avalanche-profile/

Here's some excerpts..

Quote:

.. It’s spotless, though it’s now seeing its first off-season of sweat. And it’s outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment, built to specs detailed by the guest MacKinnon has just buzzed in: Andy O’Brien, trainer to NHL stars. A native of Charlottetown, P.E.I., O’Brien serves as the director of sport science and performance for the Penguins during the regular season and spends his summers working with clients who rank in the NHL’s elite, including MacKinnon and his next-door neighbour on Grand Lake, Sidney Crosby. O’Brien makes regular trips out east in the off-season and MacKinnon has made trips west to work out at O’Brien’s gym in Etobicoke. When they can’t schedule face-to-face time, MacKinnon works out on his own from programs written by O’Brien. He also works with Alex Pianosi, O’Brien’s long-time business partner. Plus, MacKinnon can always get in a skate, some track work and a hill run with his neighbour. “Mike Sullivan told me after we played against the Avs that Nathan was the best player we faced all season.” O’Brien is in MacKinnon’s ear as they get work through a warmup and some stretching, but it’s not what you might expect. This isn’t the dynamic of a drill sergeant to a recruit. This isn’t the scene at the NHL combine, where you have staff shouting in the ear of a prospect trying to push through pain on a stationary bike. No, it’s a discussion of restaurants in town, plans for the rest of the summer, changes in downtown Halifax — strictly water-cooler stuff. Only occasionally does something drop that reminds you this isn’t the Y or a Goodlife. “I was talking to Sid the other day,” O’Brien says. “I said, ‘Look at the three guys from here that I work with’ — y’know, you, Sid and Marshy…” The latter being Brad Marchand, of the Boston Bruins. “…you’re all animals in the gym.” Yeah, all animals and all All-Stars.

This is where he talks about how important it is for a young player to improve skating technique FIRST before Strength.. as he says.. you can always build strength later, but your ability to improve technique diminishes quickly as the player gets older (which supports my previous hypothesis)..

Quote:

.. Yet another parallel to Crosby: In the summer after his first year at Shattuck, MacKinnon started working with O’Brien. He’d had a small taste of life under the trainer back when he was peewee-aged. “I did one workout with him, mostly lunges and that sort of thing. Andy asked what I did for workouts and my dad told him I used to run telephone poles on the way home from school with my backpack on. That was my sprint work. That was all I did.” Though he never came off as even a bit full of himself, MacKinnon was pretty puffed up when he first went to O’Brien that summer. “I had this video of me at Shattuck and thought Andy would watch me skate and be impressed,” he says. “When I was 14 or 15, I thought I was a sick skater. Andy looked and said, ‘Look how bent over you are when you’re skating.’ Mechanically I had a lot to work on. I got humbled quick.” The regimen that followed was not what the teenager expected. O’Brien reprised the role of Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, you know, the learning-to-walk-before-you-run proposition. That’s exactly what he had MacKinnon do: walk. All summer long. For hours. On a treadmill. Yeah, he had skipped too far ahead when he was running from telephone pole to telephone pole. It was as boring as it sounds, but a little more intense than you might imagine. It wasn’t a stroll, but rather a steep incline. “We focused on flexing his ankle and positive shin angle,” O’Brien says. “My experience is that it’s hard to train technique later. If you’re three, four, five years in, it’s hard to retrain and correct technique. You can wait for the power. Other than Sid, Nate was the only teenager I worked with where I had the benefit of taking that approach and being able to be patient with the process. If you’re in the NHL, you don’t have the luxury of time.” “I was so raw that’s really where we had to start, the basics,” MacKinnon says. “I tried to understand what it was that we were trying to do but at a certain level it came down to trust and I just had to trust Andy.” MacKinnon stuck with the summer sessions — not surprising, given that he was committed enough to go to Shattuck for two years. And not surprising, given O’Brien’s track record, which is basically a drop-out rate of zero. “It takes a certain type of person to sign on,” O’Brien says. “Any of my clients have to be self-motivated. They come to me looking for a way to get better. Looking for any way, whatever it’s going to take.” Effectively, they need a bit of Crosby about them. FUNDAMENTALIST The first time they worked together, O'Brien had MacKinnon relearn how to walk. “I was so raw that’s really where we had to start, the basics,” MacKinnon says. O’Brien says that MacKinnon didn’t put on muscle like Crosby had and that continues to this day — I was a little skeptical when I first heard that. I saw Crosby for the first time back in August ’03, when he was the same age MacKinnon was at the Mooseheads’ camp. MacKinnon looked much more filled-out, but put it down to either the limitations of the eye test or a trick of memory, or both. MacKinnon’s first game with the Mooseheads was an exhibition against Cape Breton at the Halifax Forum. From his first shift, he had the opposing defencemen struggling to get their legs under them; they couldn’t even begin to deal with his speed. On that shift, he set up Martin Frk for a goal and though he was limited to that assist on the score sheet, he was clearly the most impressive prospect on the ice. MacKinnon, though, was hardly impressed with himself. Today, he admits that he had doubts about making the jump from Shattuck the Q. “I [wondered] what was I getting myself into,” he says. “I didn’t think it would be easy and it wasn’t. Everyone was much bigger and stronger. Everyone was trying to get as big as possible, on the bench [press], whatever. I was 15. I spent the summer walking on a treadmill. I didn’t lift a weight all summer. I’m gonna get f—in’ crushed.”

That's what the Oilers require, a top end, hi-tech, leading edge, Department of Sports Science.. they can have sub-departments.. (by order of importance) Skating Technique and Performance, Goaltending Performance (with a spiritual component to channel the flow of Goalie Voo-Doo!).. Shot Mechanics.. Strength and Conditioning.. and Nutrition and Diet.

As an example of how high a level of skating technique and analysis can take, here is a study for speed skating stride analysis, the same could be done for hockey.. except it'd be more complex, you'd also have to include other parameters such as agility and edge work into the analysis.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002192901 7304608

[Updated on: Sun, 21 May 2023 21:48]

McDAVID! Oh YEAH Baby!!
Tic-Tac-Tao!
Keep on Rockin' in the Free World
P. Chiarelli math.. T. Hall = A. Larsson, Yak= bag o'pucks (OK he got one right...) K. Russell = $4.1 M+NMC, G. Reinhart= M. Barzal + A. Beauvillier, J. Eberle = R. Spooner,

[Updated on: Mon, 22 May 2023 22:19]

"We need to get better immediately. That starts today"
- Lowe, 2013

"Next year I would forecast as another developmental year"
- MacT, 2015

5 x $5,000,000

"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
#FireBobbyNicks

Adam wrote on Tue, 23 May 2023 02:40

I'd love to trade away Campbell instead, but that contract is a nightmare right now. I think he's unmovable without a Kassian-type sweetener package. Just hope he can play 30-35 games in a back-up role for the remainder of his deal (or until it's palatable to park him on some cap floor team in 2-3 years).

Campbell as part of an Erik Karlsson deal?

One big shift I see with goalies is that the role of "backup" seems to be more important than it ever has been. Especially in these playoffs. Of the final 4 teams, only the Stars' Oettinger has started all of his team's games. The Leafs, Bruins, Devils, Devils all had more than one starter as well.

Of the 16 teams, only the Oilers, Stars, Avs, Kings, and Kraken had only 1 starter the duration of the playoffs.

I could be wrong, but it feels like teams have realized that goaltending can be voodoo and are more willing to sit their "starter". Unless you are blessed by bonafide studs like Price or Vasilevsky, a goaltending by committee approach could help to insulate against a guy going into a funk and maybe allowing someone to catch lightning in a bottle for a couple of months.

[Updated on: Tue, 23 May 2023 06:44]

"We need to get better immediately. That starts today"
- Lowe, 2013

"Next year I would forecast as another developmental year"
- MacT, 2015

5 x $5,000,000

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

Clean house or bust

"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
#FireBobbyNicks

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

"We need to get better immediately. That starts today"
- Lowe, 2013

"Next year I would forecast as another developmental year"
- MacT, 2015

5 x $5,000,000

"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
#FireBobbyNicks

"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
#FireBobbyNicks

[Updated on: Tue, 23 May 2023 11:22]

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.

Please do not feed the bears. Feeding the bears creates a dependent population unable to survive on their own. Bears.