IS MCLELLAN’S BOLD GOAL ATTAINABLE?
Improvement in goal differential could mean playoff contention
Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli is careful about any specific achievement goals for the 2016-17 Edmonton Oilers, but his coach Todd McLellan is letting it rip.
On the first day of training camp last Friday, Chiarelli told reporters he wasn’t ready to make his expectations public.
“I have them and I will share them at some point but (not yet). We are going to improve.”
McLellan, though, was much more specific: “Last season we shaved 43 goals off our difference from 2014-15 and the task is doing it again. We have to repeat it again to be a playoff contender.”
If the Oilers improve by 43 goals, they will score more goals than they let in and will likely make the playoffs. But, every NHL team hopes to improve its goal differential by 43 goals, or even by a more modest number — say, 35 goals. It’s a feat that only a handful of teams accomplish each year.
In 2014-15, this kind of 35-goal improvement was engineered by just eight teams, the New York Islanders (+64), Calgary (+57), Florida (+55), Ottawa (+52), Nashville (+50), Vancouver (+47), Washington (+44) and the New York Rangers (+35). In 2015-16, five teams pulled it off — Buffalo (+92), Florida (+53), Edmonton (+43), Dallas (+36) and San Jose (+35).
Only one team pulled off the feat two years running, the Florida Panthers, which had added young superstar Aaron Ekblad to its roster (and after this two-year run of improvement, Florida cleaned house in management, if you can believe it).
Perhaps the Oilers, with their own young superstar, will also go on a two-year improvement streak in goals differential. TSN hockey analyst Bob McKenzie weighed in on this, saying, “If they stay healthy, especially Connor McDavid and the (Oscar) Klefbom/(Adam) Larsson pairing, there is reason to believe they will be better. No one can or wants to say exactly how much better, but one suspects that this Oilers regime would be happy if these Oilers are at least still in the fight, so to speak, when they’re playing games in March or April.
My bet is the Oilers will turn the corner on losing this year. The Oilers have much better overall depth and should not start the year, at least, with too many weak links in key roster spots. There’s also much better balance on the roster when it comes to size and weight.
Chiarelli has often talked about the need to have bigger players to survive the grind of the regular season, where large, heavy Western Conference teams happily wear down smaller teams like the Oilers. The Oilers GM has now made good on his promise to remake the roster. He has replaced five regular players from last year’s roster who averaged 6-feet, 1-inches and 199 pounds with five players who average 6-feet, 3-inches, 218-pounds.
Gone as regulars are Taylor Hall, Teddy Purcell, Lauri Korpikoski, Justin Schultz and (likely) Iiro Pakarinen. In are Milan Lucic, Patrick Maroon, Zack Kassian, Larsson and (likely) Jesse Puljujarvi.
Just as importantly, while none of the departing players played any kind of intimidating physical game, Lucic, Kassian and Maroon aren’t just big, they’re also known for their hitting and fighting.
Chiarelli’s move to bigger players isn’t a new thing but started when he took over the team. Compared to the 2013-14 roster of the Oilers — head coach Dallas Eakins’ first year with the team and somewhere in the middle of the Oil’s Smurf experiment — these new Oilers are now, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier.
There’s no real comparison of the intimidation factor of the 2013-14 roster compared to the 2016-17 roster. That old Eakins team relied on Luke Gazdic, and had a few other players with an edge in David Perron, Andrew Ference, Matt Hendricks (after he arrived in a trade) and, maybe, if you’re really pushing it, Anton Belov. This team has Lucic, Maroon, Kassian, Hendricks and Darnell Nurse, with Benoit Pouliot, Brandon Davidson and Larsson all playing with a bit of an edge.
It’s not yet known if the team’s new size and toughness will pay off in more wins. But it is known that Chiarelli is a general manager of his word.
He promised the team would get bigger and tougher. It is bigger and tougher.
Chiarelli is not promising a playoff berth. But I suspect this is just a case of him under-promising, and that this team is going to over deliver and come close to McLellan’s goal for improving the goal differential.