Barons aces can help Oilers
How does new general manager Craig MacTavish envision the Edmonton Oilers playing hockey? Fast, skilled and in control of the puck.
“I think from my perspective and our organization’s perspective, we’re a team that is a highly-skill driven team, a team that is going to be a puckpossession game,” MacTavish recently told broadcaster Bob Stauffer, spelling out his vision for the team as clearly as he’s yet done.
“It’s a game that I like to see. It’s a game that I like to play. I know our fans like that style of hockey where you have the mobility on the back end where you can make three or four passes and maybe reboot the attack and come back with the puck and try and open up some offensive seams, and then fill those offensive seams with a lot of speed. And we have a lot of guys who are first-shot scorers and can capitalize. I think that style of play I’m very comfortable with and very comfortable knowing it’s a style of play we can win with.”
MacTavish took a solid step towards the Oilers being able to play this style of game with this week’s signing of Russian puck-moving defenceman Anton Belov, who was the top defender on his Omsk team in the Kontinental Hockey League and was eighth in KHL scoring for defencemen.
MacTavish will also find help on Edmonton’s farm team. The Oklahoma City Barons have plenty of players excelling at puck possession in the American Hockey League playoffs. The list includes wingers Toni Rajala and Teemu Hartikainen, centre Mark Arcobello and defencemen Taylor Fedun and Martin Marincin.
The pairing of Marincin and Fedun, especially, is strong at controlling the play. When they get the puck, they don’t give it up easily. The work it around. They keep their heads up. They get open, keep moving, and hit speedy forwards like Rajala and Arcobello with outlet passes.
In 13 playoff games, Fedun and Marincin have both chipped in on 27 scoring chances at even strength, the most of any d-men on the team.
Fedun is 25 and NHL-ready. He’s just six-foot, 190 pounds, and he’s coming off a catastrophic broken leg and surgery. But he’s skating much better now than he did last October. At the AHL level, he’s starting to dominate games with his puck-moving skills.
Fedun isn’t big for a defenceman. He will get beat now and then in the NHL on the boards by quick and big attackers, but he’s rarely out of position.
As for the forwards, Edmonton had all kinds of centres and wingers this past season who weren’t up to a puck-possession game. They repeatedly failed to effectively cycle the puck in the offensive end.
Many fans and hockey pundits will argue that the main problem with the Oilers is a lack of toughness and grit, not a lack of skill, but skill is needed to move the puck successfully in the offensive end. Skill players like husky Hartikainen and two smaller forwards, Arcobello and Rajala, are certainly cycling it well in the AHL playoffs. Rajala leads the Barons, chipping in on 5.3 scoring chances per game, with Hartikainen next, 4.9, then Arcobello, 4.6.
Would the Oilers be willing to make a bet on smaller puckpossession aces like Fedun, Arcobello and Rajala, rather than go with bigger, tougher, but far less skilled players like Mike Brown, Lennart Petrell and Mark Fistric?
Skill is a good bet, but only so long as the skilled players work like dogs in the defensive end and on the backcheck, and only so long as they’re smart enough positional players to be on the right side of the puck in the defensive zone. Too often, the Oilers’ skilled players have failed to work hard and smart enough on defence.
It’s no use stacking the bottom lines with puck watchers, puck hogs and fundamentally unsound defenders. But not one of the top Barons prospects appears to be lacking in defensive effort or ice awareness. The longer the OKC playoff run goes, the more opportunity each of the Barons aces has to make his case.