McLellan has tools to coach Oilers
NEW BENCH BOSS: Whether he’s able to create a situation that could lead to post-season success remains to be seen
Todd McLellan certainly has landed in a high-risk, highreward situation after his excellent job with Team Canada at the world hockey championship in Prague.
On the one hand you can certainly see the possible rewards of becoming the 14th coach in Edmonton Oilers NHL history.
With Connor McDavid set to join an already significant array of excellent young talent, the parts are in place to have somebody come in and create a situation that could lead to a Chicago Blackhawks-like run of success including Stanley Cups, something that would certainly irk longsuffering Canuck fans.
With McDavid coming in and pushing Ryan Nugent-Hopkins into a second-line centre role, essentially Edmonton is now set down the middle just as they are down south in Calgary with Sam Bennett and Sean Monahan. Potential of a return to the late ’80s rivalries between the Oilers and the Flames must surely have come up in people’s thoughts even if the reality is some time away yet.
Which brings us to the risk factors here, both for McLellan and the new management crew in Edmonton with GM Peter Chiarelli and new overlord Bob Nicholson.
For starters, this team has missed the playoffs for nine consecutive seasons and it just might be said that this last year was perhaps the worst of the bunch. There is now a longstanding tradition of the inept there that seems to defy odds in much the same way it has with the Chicago Cubs over the years.
The team goes out and gets people that appear to have the capability to come in and help, but as soon as they put on that jersey, something happens and they’re not quite the same player.
Maybe they’ve been the wrong guy, maybe they haven’t been top people because nobody wanted to go to Edmonton, especially into that quagmire.
And maybe the environment gets them, but something happens. Nine years on the outside is a long time in a conference where now at least, there are only 13 other teams with which to compete.
There have been a lot of good coaches come in and try to teach this constantly evolving group how to play, but each in succession has failed. Is McLellan going to be any different? Perhaps nobody can teach these guys how to play.
Then there is McLellan himself. Yes he had some success in San Jose and the CV looks very good with all those Western Conference final appearances. But never did they make it to the Cup final despite having some very good teams, despite the fact that GM Doug Wilson made frequent seemingly very solid changes to the roster immediately following each disappointing finish.
And at the end there was something extremely toxic going on in that Sharks organization. The public saw mostly the public spat between Joe Thornton and Wilson with the verbal exchanges getting the headlines at the end, but this dysfunction started long before this past season’s blow up.
Thornton and Patrick Marleau tended to get most of the blame, but throughout the entire fiasco we have McLellan in the middle of it seemingly unable to overcome whatever was going. Only those on the inside really know what the problems are there and maybe absolutely none of it was his fault. But to assume he played absolutely no part is likely naive.
That said, most everyone thinks this is a great hire because he’s such an outstanding communicator. He makes people around him feel important and included and he seems to have an excellent sense of what he’s up against.
“We’re not going to talk about playoffs here,” he told the news conference in Edmonton. “We’re going to talk about foundation, about creating an identity and building toward it. The playoff part of it exists after you accomplish those regular season things and we’ve got work to do.
“The plan is to take it up and begin to climb the mountain. We have to chart a path to begin with. We have to determine what we want to be and how we want to look. We have to find the players within the organization right now and put them in the right spots.
“With all of that there’s pain. There are nights when we’re not going to be pleased. But there’s four teams that are playing right now who experienced that as well, they had painful nights too, but fewer of them.
“We’re trying to take those painful nights and diminish them throughout the years to the point where we can be at the top of the mountain.”