Oilers have stars, lack grinders
Talent aplenty, but team needs supporting cast
“It isn’t the high price of stars that is expensive; it’s the high price of mediocrity.”
— Bill Veeck
The Edmonton Oilers know the feeling.
Unlike many NHL teams, the Oilers have, if that’s possible, a surfeit of skill, but a paucity of what we’ll call reliable support personnel, all over their unfinished lineup. That’s a better problem to have than the reverse. But it’s still a problem.
The Oilers’ disappointing 3-1 loss to the Phoenix Coyotes — on fan appreciation night — brings them one stride closer to the off-season roster renovation they clearly need to lift them to the next level.
The organizational goal was to play meaningful games in April and, by dint of the fivegame winning streak that preceded the current four-game losing skid, that target was met. But only just.
Still, this truncated but fascinating season has demonstrated a number of things. The Oilers young stars are growing up, particularly Taylor Hall, who has become the kind of dominant impact player in the NHL that he was in junior.
His linemates, Ryan NugentHopkins, who plays far too smart a defensive game for someone his tender age (19), and Jordan Eberle are maturing, also, at their own rate.
Case in point, with a minute to go in the first period of a 0-0 game Wednesday night, there was Nugent-Hopkins winning the defensive-zone faceoff.
Seconds later, Eberle created a turnover and sped away with Hall on a two-on-one. The scoring opportunity fizzled, but that the line was out there at all in such a situation is a measure of their increased reliability.
In the last two seasons, the Oilers did their best to protect their talented youngsters. This season, particularly recently, as the games have become more crucial, the trend is to give them more ice time, more responsibility, not less.
The same goes for goaltender Devan Dubnyk, given a chance to claim a starting job, has elevated his game.
The knock on him is his penchant for giving up the bad goal, as he did Wednesday night on the first two Phoenix goals, by Boyd Gordon and Antoine Vermette.
This is one reason the Oilers (unsuccessfully) pursued Ben Bishop at the trade deadline. But the plan to go with two young goalies and let the best man win the No. 1 job went by the boards when the Ottawa Senators traded their depth goalie to the Tampa Bay Lightning.
To be fair to Dubnyk, he also made a cluster of key saves, particularly in the third period, to keep his team in the game.
Still on the back end, defenceman Jeff Petry, encouraged to be more physical and to play a 200-foot game, has emerged as a well-rounded NHL defender.
Along with gifted rookie Justin Schultz and responsible veteran Nick Schultz, Petry and Ladislav Smid, the Oilers have a solid four-pack to build a strong defence corps around.
After that? That’s where things get tricky. Among Mark Fistric, another impending unrestricted free agent (UFA), Corey Potter, who has another year on his contract, Whitney and Theo Peckham, who has played four games all season, who will Edmonton keep?
The trade deadline came and went and the Oilers didn’t move Whitney, a healthy sitter much of the first part of the season, a valuable contributor more recently, an unrestricted free agent on July 1.
Do the Oilers plan to re-sign Whitney? You wouldn’t think so, given his fall from favour. At any rate, general manager Steve Tambellini has said the club will address contractual issues at season’s end. The GM will have a lengthy to-do list on his desk by then.
Along with Whitney and Fistric, Ryan Jones, Lennert Petrell, veteran goalie Nikolai Khabibulin and newly acquired centre Jerred Smithson, all are UFAs at season’s end. Smithson is precisely the sort of centre the Oilers expected Eric Belanger to be, by the way.
So, it turns out assembling the supporting cast has been, to say the least, an inefficient process in Edmonton.
They discarded both Ben Eager and Darcy Hordichuk, for example, before trading for Mike Brown, who seems to fill the fourth-line energy winger role effectively. Third time was the charm.
Can they squeeze another effective season out of aging warrior Ryan Smyth, or is that another hard — really hard — off-season decision to make? Smyth has two goals all year, none in his last 23 games, just six in his last 83 games, dating back to last season.
Can Magnus Paajarvi and Teemu Hartikainen become the consistent, tough-toplay-against power forwards the Oilers envision them to be? On and on.
It’s glaringly evident the Oilers are several bricks shy of a load, anywhere from six to nine, depending on who’s counting.
So, once they do get around to addressing the significant off-season roster work needed, it’s going to be a large, perhaps massive job.