PATIENCE IS NOT A VIRTUE FOR OILERS THIS YEAR
If losses mount early and playoff spot looks out of reach, expect team to clean house
It’ll be no place for a nervous person.
Training camp for the Edmonton Oilers, which starts with medicals Thursday, may look like fun and games from the stands at Rogers Place. But for the following 16 days until they fly to Europe and return, pressure will be applied from just about every direction on just about everybody involved.
If the fourth edition of the Connor McDavid Era Oilers misses the playoffs, just about everybody gets fired.
Peter Chiarelli gets canned. Todd McLellan gets gassed. A whole new collection of assistant coaches will be sacked.
And the worst possible thing — a rebuild of the rebuild of the rebuild — will transpire.
The “McDavid Window” for a second Stanley Cup era in Edmonton opened last year and the Oilers tripped as they approached it, fell out the window and dropped about 20 storeys.
The team many projected to end up in the Stanley Cup Final — like so many are doing with the Toronto Maple Leafs this year — fell 25 points short of the mark it set the year before and missed the playoffs by 17 points.
Chiarelli, who didn’t find McDavid his first-line right winger or a right-handed shot top-pairing defenceman in the off-season, will go into training camp managing from the edge of a cliff.
McLellan, if he doesn’t produce a power play and get this team out of the gate quickly despite an exceptionally challenging schedule to start the season, will be coaching from the end of the plank.
If the 40th anniversary Oilers essentially remove themselves from playoff contention by Grey Cup weekend again, Oilers CEO Bob Nicholson is going to wish he hadn’t left Hockey Canada.
If owner Daryl Katz delivers another sorry season, he’s going to have to sit beside Ottawa’s Eugene Melnyk at the governors meetings with both wearing “I’m With Stupid” T-shirts.
As the Oilers head to training camp, the thought occurs that the No. 1 thing that has to happen here is this: Most everybody involved has to get lucky.
Puck luck was not on the menu last year.
There were several things about the Oilers in 2017-18 that made no sense.
How does a team with McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins finish 31st in the league in power play production at 14.8 per cent efficiency after being fifth at 22.9 per cent the year before?
How does Milan Lucic score one goal in his last 43 games?
How does a team allow the first shot on goal to leak in 13 times during a season?
How does goaltender Cam Talbot’s play plummet from a career average of a 2.50 goals-against average and .918 save percentage to finishing the season with a 3.02 GAA and .908 save percentage?
The focus before the Oilers fly to Germany and then open the season against Taylor Hall and the New Jersey Devils in Gothenburg, Sweden, will definitely be on Talbot, Lucic and what new assistant coaches Trent Yawney and Manny Viveiros are going to do about the special teams.
Turn Talbot and Lucic around and turn the power play around and you turn the Oilers around.
Chiarelli, who appeared to make all the right moves the year before, had one of those Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong ”) seasons. And it ended with the ultimate pie in the face when McDavid didn’t win his second straight Hart Trophy because the supporting cast let him down and missed the playoffs and the voters gave it to the guy Chiarelli traded away — Taylor Hall.
If Jesse Puljujarvi, the No. 4 overall pick in the 2016 entry draft, is finally ready to take his projected place, the Oilers can get back on the “up” escalator again. So he’ll be a study.
And if Swedish defencemen Adam Larsson and Oscar Klefbom return to play like they did in the playoffs two years ago, and the defencemen the Oilers have been developing in the organization take further steps, all will be well.
But the thing is, most of that not only has to happen, but it also has to happen in a hurry.
The team is holding a compressed training camp before flying to Europe to open the season against New Jersey, then returning to North America to play in Boston, New York and Winnipeg on the way home.
And when they do get home, the team that has to rank No. 1 in NHL history in first-gameback-from-a-road-trip losses, plays host to Boston, Nashville and the two most recent Stanley Cup champions, Pittsburgh and Washington.
Those teams, in order of games scheduled, had 97, 112, 77, 114, 112, 117, 107 and 105 points last year.
Definitely not a place for a nervous person.