This in from former NHL grinder Matthew Barnaby and former NHL GM Brian Burke: the Edmonton Oilers problem is more than goaltending, it’s the team’s awful defensive play.
Both Barnaby and Burke spoke out following Edmonton’s 8-3 loss to the Dallas Stars, with Barnaby labelling the Oil’s defensive play “absolutely putrid” and breaking down the mistakes on three of Dallas’ first period goals against Edmonton in an on-line video.
Said Barnaby: “If we want to know why the Edmonton Oilers stink right now, yeah, goaltending, gotta get a save, but it’s much more than that.”
Burke was equally scathing in an interview with Jeff Marek on The Sheet podcast.
Rumour has it the Oilers are in the market for a new goalie, which saw Marek ask Burke about Colorado’s success last season in swapping out its two goalies in-season and bringing in Mackenzie Blackwood and Scott Wedgewood (though Colorado didn’t make it out of the first round of the playoffs):
Said Burke: “Well, swapping out two goaltenders, I’ve never heard of that being done before. I’m pretty sure it has not been done in the modern era. But I think there’s some luck involved in that. They got lucky. They made two big moves. Colorado got lucky…. So they’re geniuses, right? But that doesn’t mean it’s going to work again.”
Burke then turned his attention to Edmonton’s defensive issues. “To me, the mistakes are so bad…. I used to blame evaluating goaltenders. I said, ‘Okay, what goals should he have stopped?’ What goals should Skinner have stopped last night? Answer, none, none. The breakdowns are so widespread and so sequential. One turnover, then a breakdown, then a bad coverage, and it’s in the net. I don’t know how you fault the goalie, Stuart Skinner, for that. And (Calvin) Pickard comes in, and they hang him out to dry too. So it starts with a patient commitment to defense that they don’t have right now.”
Burke put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Oiler players, not Skinner and Pickard and not coach Kris Knoblauch.
“Does a coach wake up one morning and forget everything he learned? Did Knoblauch wake up today and say, ‘I’m stupid today?’ No. Did Chief (Toronto coach Craig Berube)? Those guys are good coaches. They don’t become stupid overnight. And the notion that somehow this is a coaching failure just astounds me. It’s not a coaching failure. It’s a player execution failure.
“You stop the bleeding, stop giving up goals. The fact is, if you can’t score, the least you can do is not get scored upon. So, tighten up your back check, get pucks deep, get pucks out, play conservatively, back check, come back deeper in your own zone, cover those loose pucks, make a commitment to defense to the bottom six (forwards).”
My take
1. This is the message I’ve been saying for years now, when it comes to Edmonton giving up too many Grade A, 5-alarm and goals against: If leaking stops, the Oilers will be tops.
2. At times the Oil have committed to strong defensive play and they’ve gone on long runs of winning. This happened last year in the playoffs during the Los Angeles series and it carried through to the Stanley Cup Final. It can happen again. But Burke and Barnaby are correct in that it’s not happening now.
The Oilers have the lowest save percentage in the NHL, just .873. Only the Vancouver Canucks have given up more goals against per game.
coaches
As I mentioned a day ago, in Knoblauch’s first season with the team, Edmonton had 16.2 Grade A shots per game and gave up just 11.6 per game. This year they’ve created 13.7 Grade A shots per game and given up 14.3 per game.
The Oilers are worse on offence. They are worse on defence. Their Grade A shots differential has slipped from +4.6 per game to -0.6 per game. That’s a crash in flow of play that should create alarm.
And if the Oilers are down a quart on the attack, how about even more of a focus on defence? It’s their only hope. They’re not going to score their way out of his mess.
3. Here’s how I saw the first four goals against the Oilers in the first period against Dallas:
Goal One: Evan Bouchard loses battle behind net, Mattias Ekholm has crept behind net instead of guarding the front, Skinner fails to cut out pass through the crease, Podkolzin fails to cover danger man, who scores.
Goal Two: Savoie and Henrique beat on great pass leading to wicked shot, Skinner stop this first one, falls forward, and no one covers the danger man who deposits rebound.
Goal Three: Trent Frederic turnover at o-blueline, then makes a bad line change, Brett Kulak loses battle on boards, with Leon Draisaitl caught flat-footed at centre ice, and Stuart Skinner beat on 2-on-1 shot.
Goal Four: Mattias Ekholm turnover, Connor McDavid overcommits on defence, fails to cover danger man, he and Ekholm allow pass, and Bouchard lets his man go, who scores.
4. The Oilers best players are making the most mistakes on defence. In terms of trends, I see some players trying to do too much, which too often means chasing after the puck too ardently and leaving their own check or zone of responsibility uncovered in the zone system, as we saw with McDavid on the fourth Dallas goal.
Players who often chase the puck too much include McDavid, Vasily Podkolzin, Matt Savoie, Jake Walman and Darnell Nurse.
Then there are the players who watch the play too much and too often and sometimes don’t strive urgently to make a defensive stop. I’d put Bouchard, Trent Frederic and Leon Draisaitl in that category.
All of these players have been and can be top defenders. All of them (save for Nurse and Frederic) got it done last year in the playoffs for the Oilers.
It’s time to make defence the focus again right now and go on a winning streak, no?
As one of team’s best defenders, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, put it before the Dallas game, “I think the farther along we go here, the more it sets in that we’re a defensive team first and that’s how we’re going to win games.”
I’m not so sure this notion is setting in, but RNH is perfectly correct.
At the Cult of Hockey
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