Edmonton Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch — who we routinely praise at the Cult of Hockey for his coaching style and decisions — failed at his most important job in Tuesday night’s 4-3 loss the Nashville Predators.
In his book The Game, former Montreal Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden reported that he once asked his coach Scotty Bowman what the most important job of any coach was.
“To get the right players on the ice,” said Bowman.
Bowman isn’t just any NHL coach. He won nine Stanley Cups as a coach, five in Montreal, one in Pittsburgh, and three in Detroit. I put great weight in his opinion.
And I’ll suggest that Knoblauch, who slowly but surely has been finding forward lines and defence pairings for the Oilers that perform well, defied Bowman’s first rule of coaching with his line-up against the Predators, namely by switching out and scratching centre Curtis Lazar for rookie forward Ike Howard on the fourth line.
Why was this such a mistake?
Knoblauch has been searching with some desperation, especially early when he went to the blender repeatedly, for functional line combinations all year. In the last seven weeks he’s had some success, first putting Connor McDavid, Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins together on a otherworldly skilled top line, then assembling a powerful, hard-checking, offensive zone cycling machine of a second line of Leon Draisaitl, Vasily Podkolzin and Kasperi Kapenen.
All season Knoblauch has also wanted a big, aggressive energy line, and he finally found something like that too in recent games, putting rugged, smart and tenacious Curtis Lazar together with fast Mattias Janmark and tough guy Trent Frederic.
Against Chicago on Monday, the Lazar line rocked the Blackhawks in Edmonton’s 4-1 win, creating all kinds of Grade A shots and give up next to zilch in their own end. The line’s success was remarkable, not just because Knoblauch had assembled an effective fourth line, but because Frederic had been struggling to find any kind of on-ice success all season, and here he was forechecking hard and chipping in on seven Grade A shots without any mistakes on a Grade A shot against. In Oilers hockey terms, this represented a minor miracle.
So you’d want to build on that, right? You’d want to keep Frederic going, correct? You’d never want to discard that kind of chemistry, mess with that kind of success, agreed?
But that’s exactly what Knoblauch did when he put in Howard for Lazar, a decision all the more perplexing because Howard is a scoring forward, not any kind of fourth-line checker. If you want him to fail on the ice, inserting him as a fourth line grinder is a sure plan.
The move was so inexplicable that my fellow Cult of Hockey writer Kurt Leavins said that when he heard the line-up change on TV just before the game, he was so befuddled by it he had to hit replay to listen to it again to make sure he’d heard it correctly.
How did it play out in the game? Frederic made not one contribution to a Grade A shot, but made mistakes on three against, including being late to the point shooter on Nashville’s third goal late in the second period. On that same play, Howard had turned over the puck in the defensive slot, kicking off the sequence of pain.
Howard made not one contribution to a Grade A shot but three mistakes as well. It was his worst game of the year. As for Janmark, the line’s third member, he took a bad penalty in the third that almost cost his team the game.
In that same third period, Howard sent a pass into Frederic’s skates and when Frederic failed to corral it, Nashville charged off on a dangerous 3-on-2, leading to two 5-alarm slot shots that Edmonton goalie Tristan Jarry somehow managed to save.
Again, at the Cult of Hockey, you won’t find Leavins or me with much negative to say about Kris Knoblauch. We both agree he’s a good-to-great coach. Indeed, getting a team to two Stanley Cup Finals two years in a row in a 32-team league is arguably as impressive as winning a Cup in the 18-team league of the late 1970s, when Bowman’s Habs won five Cups.
But not against Nashville, not when he messed with success and failed at the most important job of any coach.
I’ll should point out, as sports commentator Reid Wilkins of Edmonton Sporks Talk radio reported, that the Oilers record with Lazar in the lineup is 15-7-2. the Oilers record without Lazar in the lineup is 8-9-6.
These kind of stats can be coincidental, especially when it comes to the impact of one fourth-line player on a game. But I put some weight in it, namely because when Lazar has played, he’s played strong two-way hockey for a fourth line grinder, and because any player on the ice can make a critical mistake that leads to a gaol against.
When goals are so rare, that kind of mistake has major implications, as seen by Howard’s slot turnover late in the second. That tied up the game at a key moment. If Lazar had been on that line, I don’t see that line giving up a goal, certainly not that kind of goal. If Lazar had played maybe that fourth line, fresh off its Chicago success, would have been humming.
This doesn’t mean I think the Oilers should hot have played Howard. He’s a great young attacker and I’d like to see him get a solid shot just now.
But put him where he can succeed.
And keep Lazar, Frederic and Janmark were they have succeeded together on the fourth line.
47 games
At the Cult of Hockey
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