Oilers in desperate state to create more offence
Coach at wit’s end trying to find more ‘secondary’ scorers to back up the big line
Edmonton Oilers coach Ken Hitchcock was not a happy camper on New Year’s Eve when he saw Claude Lemieux’s boy Brendan, who has some of the greasy attributes of his old man and four-time Stanley Cup winner but is a little-used fourthliner in his first NHL season, get two goals in eight minutes of work for the Winnipeg Jets in a 4-3 win over the Oilers.
Or when Jets buzz saw thirdliner Brandon Tanev got his eighth of the year on a deflection while big guns Mark Scheifele, Patrik Laine, Kyle Connor and Nikolaj Ehlers didn’t get a sniff.
Hitchcock would die for some of that secondary scoring on his now (18-18-3) team but as far as the Oilers are concerned right now, there’s been none of that in a six-game losing skid heading into the season’s midway pole Saturday in Los Angeles.
Hitchcock is beginning to realize what predecessor Todd McLellan knew all too well that if Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and the currently injured Alex Chiasson ( bruised knee) don’t score, the Oilers are dead in the water.
The first three guys have 56 goals of the team’s 111. Throw in Chiasson and they have 72 of the 97 goals scored by forwards. Conversely, the Jets have eight each from Tanev and Mathieu Perreault and six from Adam Lowry, all bottom-six guys. Overall, they’ve got 22 goals from their lesser lights.
This is on Oilers’ GM Peter Chiarelli, of course. He kept last year’s group of wingers virtually intact but for signing Tobias Rieder, who is an industrious skater and checker but has no goals in 26 games.
Chiarelli should been all over Jeff Skinner, who was being shopped vigorously by Carolina but didn’t have the cap room to get him and he went to Buffalo for a middling prospect, Cliff Pu, and a few draft picks. We’ve plowed the Taylor Hall-Jordan Eberle trade ground ad nauseam, so maybe we’ll give that one a rest, for now.
Hitchcock says the problem isn’t just a lack of scoring from the bottom six (or nine) forwards, but that they’re taking too many offensive risks that are proving costly in goals against. But the lack of collective productivity is compelling nonetheless.
The Oilers had three goals from a group of left wingers, including Jujhar Khaira, Milan Lucic, Rieder and farm call-up Joe Gambardella) and 10 from the right side including Ty Rattie, Ryan Spooner, Jesse Puljujarvi and Zack Kassian, heading into their game against the Jets.
“I thought the guys we go to every game, Connor, Leon and Nuge, played their hearts out,” said Hitchcock following the Jets loss. Hitchcock started the game with McDavid, Draisaitl and RNH centring three lines but had Draisaitl back with the captain later on in the contest.
“We need some more support. The cavalry isn’t coming for those players,” said Hitchcock. “Sure, we’ll get Chiasson back, but we need the bottom end of our team to start playing better if we expect to get to the next level. If we don’t have that and aren’t competitive, that’s death.
“I don’t think it’s got anything to do with scoring (or not) goals, though. They (outside of firstline) can’t just kill minutes. They have to impact the game and that starts with effort, getting the other team’s attention. There’s too many people just trying to survive as the games go by.”
If the foot soldiers were checking well, the Oilers could live with that, says Hitchcock. But when you don’t score, you never offset mistakes defensively. “We’ve got to do a much better job of limiting the other team’s chances on the back-end of our forward group. There’s way too many red-zone chances,” said Hitchcock.
Other teams like Colorado have an unbelievable line of Nate MacKinnon, Gabe Landeskog and Mikko Rantanen (65 goals) but also have Carl Soderberg with 11 goals, J.T. Compher with 10 in 24 games, Colin Wilson with eight goals, Alex Kerfoot with 21 points.
“You can’t have the bottom part of your lineup be minus players,” said Hitchcock. Well, yes you can because Soderberg and Co. are negative on the plusminus ledger, but they can score.
Hitchcock sees the normally efficient Brodziak sitting at -12. Lucic, who unbelievably has no goals after scoring on his first shot of the season in Sweden, is at -11. Puljujarvi, who shows flashes of offence from time to time, is at -10, Spooner is -9 while Kassian, who bangs and is a good penalty-killer, is at -8.
The fourth-line winger Kassian appears to be Hitchcock’s choice to play the right side with McDavid and Draisaitl for tonight’s game against Arizona. When he played with the Sedins in Vancouver, Kassian did well for a time there so playing with the big guns is not something new.
“I wouldn’t read too much into it, it’s just practice,” said Kassian, who has 40 shots on the season but just two goals. “If I get that chance I’ll go to the net and create space and energy.”
Scoring a goal or two would help, too.
Hitchcock finds himself in a desperate state to create more offence, somewhere.
“That’s definitely true. Speaking for myself (two goals and three points (36 games) it hasn’t been good enough. We can say we’ve had a good stretch of games (as a member of the fourth-line) where we might have been controlling the 0-zone and making plays but at the end of the day, you need production,” said Kassian.