TIPPETT EYES OILERS’ LINEUP
As playoffs loom, who is ready?
We’re talkin’ about practice. That’s it.
No coach is entirely comfortable having to name a playoff lineup and starting goalie without even having seen his team play, but line rushes and intersquad scrimmages will be the only evidence available to the Edmonton Oilers’ Dave Tippett before Game 1 of the NHL’S qualifying round.
Normally, he’d have the entire stretch drive to study his lineup and see who’s locked in and ready for post-season intensity and who isn’t. This time, Tippett and his colleagues around the league won’t have much of anything to base their decisions on. Not even a single exhibition game.
Just practice.
“Preparation is going to be key, because you’re going to go from a pause to 100 m.p.h. in a hurry,” said Tippett, who expects to make his way to Edmonton within a couple of weeks for the start of Phase 2 in the NHL’S returnto-play formula.
“But it’s not like a training camp in the sense that you have 60 players and you’re looking at a lot of people. You know who you have, and you know where most of the parts fit.
“Training camp will be seeing if there is a player or two who jump up, and maybe somebody falls behind, hasn’t come in as good of shape as they should be after the pause.”
Players have been off the ice for nearly three months, with few options available for serious training, so they will definitely be in varying degrees of readiness when they return in small groups later this month. It’s going to be a challenge just getting everyone on the same page, much less complete a full evaluation.
A lot of this is going to be on the players to sharpen their focus and make the best possible use of every single practice when training camps (running anywhere from two to three weeks) begin sometime in late July.
“There are going to be guys who have an extra jump in their step, and there might be some guys where the pause has taken a toll on their bodies, we’ll monitor that,” said Tippett, adding he’s already told them what to expect when they get back.
“We have some veteran players who understand what it takes once you get into the playoffs, and how hard it’s going to be.
And we also have some young legs that, coming out of a break, should be ready to go.”
The top end of the Oilers roster is carved in stone, but there plenty of wiggle room once you get deeper into the roster. How much stock does Tippett place in how everyone was playing and what they accomplished before the season got shut down and how much of this will be starting with a totally clean slate?
“The pause has been a while, so you’re going to have to see how players react coming back,” said Tippett. “You’re probably going to get some players who are maybe not as good as they were ( before the pause) and you’ll probably get some players who are more motivated, especially ones who had injuries, to jump back in and get going.
“You know players, but you have to evaluate what they’re doing, what their conditioning level is and where they’re at right now to make sure they’re ready to go on Day 1, because it’s a different Day 1.”
Indeed. In a short series like the one Edmonton would be playing against Chicago, making the wrong calls in Game 1 could mean a quick end to the season. Deciding who gets the start between Mike Smith and Mikko Koskinen could be the call that makes or breaks everything.
If a player has a bad Game 1, does Tippett assume it’s just rust and give him a second chance in Game 2, knowing that 0-2 deficit in a best-of-five series is all but fatal? Or will he be forced to shorten all of his leashes?
“Well, you’re hoping that training camp is hard enough where it takes all of the slow starting out of it,” he said. “You’re not going to be able to tip-toe in. You’ll have to be ready from the first drop of the puck, and we hope we’ll be ready to do that.”
The Oilers, who finished 11 points ahead of the Blackhawks in the standings, are favoured in their play-in series, but the more time Tippett has to analyze the matchup, the more he cautions against taking any team with Chicago’s jewelry collection lightly.
“You look at Chicago, the thing that jumps out at you is the championship pedigree they have in Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane and Duncan Keith. They’re top, top players. Elite players. You have to respect where they’ve been, what they’ve done.”