Oilers approach their day of reckoning
Even with game’s best player his usual brilliant self, another playoff miss appears likely
EDMONTON — Dead ahead for the Edmonton Oilers could be dead ahead.
For the 11th time in 12 seasons — for the third time in four years featuring the greatest player in the game in Connor McDavid — the Oilers appear to be a sinking ship.
Every once in a while you have to remind yourself that it’s Jan. 10 and the Oilers aren’t dead yet, which in itself is an accomplishment.
This “Love Me, Love Me Not” team has so far managed to avoid mopping up another season and dropping into draft lottery position yet again.
But don’t look down. On one hand, the Oilers return from their four-game road trip to the American southwest only two points south of a wild-card playoff spot. And the team begins a stretch of seven games — with six of them at home — before the CBA-extended 10-day allstar break.
But despite the fact it’s early January and not mid-March, watching them play in putting together two wins in their past 10 games tells you it’s now Survival Season.
Edmonton is 21st overall in the NHL and went into last night’s play only six points ahead of the 31st-place Ottawa Senators. The Oilers are a team that once had an 8-1-1 run, hit a 1-6-1 skid that got Todd McLellan fired, went 9-2-2 under Ken Hitchcock when he showed up and is now 2-8 since then.
Public confidence in general manager Peter Chiarelli, who less than a month ago looked like he had saved himself, has dropped to next to nil.
With that 9-2-2 start under Hitchcock, the emergence of Alex Chiasson from a PTO look at training camp to produce 17 goals and the success of US$2.5 million KHL goalie Mikko Koskinen, who won seven straight at home until the league figured out he can’t stop anything high to the glove side, Chiarelli looked like was might be putting his sorry season of generally managing the Oilers out of the playoffs last year behind him.
If Chiarelli had looked like he’d rediscovered his genius from the 103-point playoff year of two years ago, the house of cards he’d built came tumbling down with injuries to defencemen Oscar Klefbom and Kris Russell.
Chiarelli didn’t do anything to fix the need for a top defenceman and right-winger in the off-season and left himself with no remaining salary cap room — and it suddenly bit him in the ass.
Now Edmonton fans fear his only remaining option is to pull the trigger on another terrible trade involving a talent such as Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
After his $6-million-a-year deal to sign Milan Lucic that has four years to run, the deals that saw him trade away Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle, and what he gave up to get Griffin Reinhart, the inescapable conclusion is that halfway into his make-or-break season, Chiarelli largely has left himself as a lame-duck general manager.
He went into the season knowing his team needed to make the playoffs to save his job. The Oilers come home with 43 points in 43 games. That projects to 82 in 82 and that doesn’t get you a playoff position.
Everybody in town can tell you that the Oilers have three of the very best players in the game in McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Nugent-Hopkins, along with one of the better stories of the year in Chiasson. But they can’t get untracked because most of the supporting cast Chiarelli has supplied continues to be mostly flailing and failing.
Klefbom is unlikely to be back until the Oilers complete this next stage of their schedule and Chiarelli’s latest expenditures with the final few dollars available from his mismanaged salary cap — Brandon Manning and Alex Petrovic — have yet to show they are any less incompetent than anybody else back there.
And who knows what you are going to get on any given night in goal from Cam Talbot or Koskinen, especially behind the defence as it is currently constructed?
When they’re good, they can look very good. When they are bad, they can be very, very bad — such as on the recent road trip. In Arizona and Anaheim, the Oilers were good. In Los Angeles and San Jose, they were very, very bad.
Just when things start to look good, this team dives into the toilet. Just when things look bleak, they rise from the depths of despair.
But dead ahead is quite likely the stretch of games that will likely tell the tale.
There are seven games between now and Jan. 22, when the Oilers hit the all-star break that gives them 10 days off before facing the final 32 games of the schedule. Home to Florida Thursday with visits by Arizona, Buffalo, Calgary, Carolina and Detroit with a game in Vancouver in between, you’d figure surely this team can find some success in there somewhere.
Indeed, it looks like just when they need it most, opportunity may have presented itself.
The problem with that is the last time opportunity presented itself, the Oilers had five consecutive games at home to end December and lost all five.
So it’s a fair question. Is “dead ahead” dead ahead?