[sureLoss]

Bob McKenzie chimes in:

Bob McKenzie was on Vancouver’s TSN 1040 on Tuesday morning.

On Darren Dreger’s comments on Taylor Hall, and how Hall might have been considered untouchable out of all of the Oilers:

“Well, he’s the one that certainly played the best and developed the most out of any of their young players, although like with everybody else to have hit a huge roadblock this year. But last year, he was one of the better left-wingers in the National Hockey League. Put up considerable points on a losing team.

“I’m of two minds on this whole Taylor Hall situation. The word emanating out of Edmonton is that he’s a difficult guy to coach, or that he’s not as much part of the solution as he part of the problem. And I guess I could see that.

“But the flip side of that for me is, I mean, if you go to the mall and you see a young kid acting up in the mall, is it the young kid’s fault, or is it the parents fault? And the problem I have in trying to evaluate Taylor Hall or any of the young players with the Edmonton Oilers is the parents haven’t done a very good job of raising these kids. There just hasn’t been any structure or accountability.

“The difference between what Calgary has done with Bob Hartley as coach and what the Oilers have done with a succession of coaches, it’s really striking the difference. And last year, the Calgary Flames were only five points better than the Edmonton Oilers. But didn’t it seem like they were 500 points better than the Oilers? They were a harder team to play against. They worked hard. They had structure. There seemed to be a culture. And that’s a word that gets used a lot in hockey, but the Calgary Flames seemed to be able instil a culture in terms of how, ‘This is how we play. This is how we’re accountable to each other.’ And it’s a foundation on which you can build.
“You never got the feeling with the Oilers that that culture was there. Now is that because the players won’t buy into what the coaches are selling them? Or is that because the coaches and the management are not doing a good enough job of selling it to the young players? Or they don’t have the right mix of players to be able to build on that.

“So I don’t know the answer to the question. And you’ve got to be really, really careful if you start tossing around names like Taylor Hall to trade because those were the rewards for some really bad hockey. And if you don’t make a home run trade when you trade one of those guys, you’re setting the franchise back another 10 years and my goodness, it’s almost been a decade as it is.”