Quote:
Originally Posted by FlameZilla
I would have thought the Oilers would have gelled by now with all those highly-touted prospects. Surely they only have a 2 or 3 year window to contend before they get into cap-ceiling territory.
Hall is playing at a PPG pace which is impressive for his age, Gagner is nearly at PPG. Yakupov is having an ok rookie season. I'm surprised Eberle & RNH aren't putting up better numbers; they are the ones that have impressed me the most in the past. Is there any explanation for their sub-par season thus far?
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Yeah, Kevin Lowe and Tambellini built this team in the same way that some of us draft a hockey pool. Wait that's giving them too much credit for not failing at hockey. They built their team like a crow builds its nest "Oh shiny"
Those two have no idea about building a actual succesful NHL team. They're thin at center, their bottom 6 is awful, they pretty much draft underwhelming physical specimens, they pay no attention to their blueline.
The fortunate thing for the Oilers is that Dubnyk has taken a surprising step forward and stopped some of the bleeding, without him, this Oilers team is probably sitting at about 7 wins.
Their offense is terrible, they have all these hyper skilled guys that don't have finish, their defense allows close to or do allow the most shots in the NHL.
Krueger was the wrong coach for this team. I was watching the game and RF was extoiling how during every time out the Oilers would go to the bench and old Ralphy would pull out a blackboard and teach them hockey 101 and all of the players were enraptured. But tick tack toe isn't hockey nor is a cross word puzzle. The Oiler's instead of once again dropping into the old boys network, should have found that task master coach instead of a teaching nice guy coach to go in there and start kicking these players in one direction, because that team sure looks like a group of individuals on ice.
At this point the Oilers are solidly built around a loser culture, and it goes right from the owner who messed up the negotiations for the arena and tried such ham handed maneuvers as pretending to shop for new arena situations in Hamilton and Seattle and pushed it to the point where the city council threw up their hands and told him to F off until he could get serious.
They have a President in Lowe who is a blundering mush brain who has leveraged his connections to be the coffee boy of the team Canada brain trust and drive the Oilers into the turf for 7 years.
They have Tambellini who is there to take heat for Lowe and eventually strap himself to the cross for Lowe.
The fear should be, that if there isn't a cleanout of the Oilers management office after yet another failure that some of those young superstars start asking to be moved the hell out of that organization.
As bad as the Flames are, the only saving grace is that there is a worse management team up North.
Look if I'm going to be miserable following my team, at least I can get a little pleasure in seeing that owner and management team burning that franchise to the ground.
