The Hockey PDOcast - Episode 206: Playing The Blame Game

Episode Date: November 22, 2017

Jonathan Willis joins the show to discuss where things have gone wrong in Edmonton this season (3:10), the potential for a reactionary Ryan Nugent-Hopkins trade (7:04), Peter Chiarelli's series of questionable offseason decisions (10:21), Todd McLellan's role in suboptimally using the pieces he's been given (14:52), the local media's propensity for blaming the team's best players (24:02), and if this season can be salvaged (29:33). Sponsoring today’s show is SeatGeek, which is making it easier than ever before to buy and sell sports and concert tickets. They’re giving our listeners a $20 rebate off of their first purchase. All you have to do is download the free SeatGeek app and enter the promo code PDO to get started. Also sponsoring today’s show is Harry’s Razors. If you sign up with them today using the promo code PDO, they’ll send you a trial shave set free of charge that includes: 1) weight ergonomic razor handle, 2) 5 precision-engineered blades with a lubricating strip and trimmer blade, 3) rich lathering shave gel and 4) a travel blade cover. All you have to do is cover the shipping cost and that starter kit will be dropped at your door for free. Every episode of the podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, and Stitcher. Make sure to subscribe to the show so that you don’t miss out on any new episodes as they’re released. All ratings and reviews are also greatly appreciated. Thanks for listening! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices If you'd like to gain access to the two extra shows we're doing each week this season, you can subscribe to our Patreon page here: www.patreon.com/thehockeypdocast/membership If you'd like to participate in the conversation and join the community we're building over on Discord, you can do so by signing up for the Hockey PDOcast's server here: https://discord.gg/a2QGRpJc84 The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

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Welcome to the HockeyPEDEOCast. My name is Dimitri Filipovich. And joining me is my good buddy, Jonathan. Jonathan, what's going on, man? Well, there has been one or two developments in Edmonton, as you may know. So that's mostly what's up. Yeah, I think it's safe to say it's reached DefCon 1 levels in Edmonton these days. And the funny thing, oh, I guess funny for me, maybe not funny for,

for you or others is that, you know, when I threw up the bat signal in the air yesterday and we finally arranged this thing, that was before the Blues went and hung eight goals on their heads last night. So somehow things got even worse. I, you know, I thought they were going to be, this was going to be a very grim conversation. And boy, it was I, I think, I feel like I undersold it in my plans. I feel like it's, it's gotten even worse. Yeah. Well, and we, like, we booked this after the Oilers had their two. hockey games of the year and then they managed to outdo themselves so yeah yeah I appreciate their uh I appreciate their flare for the dramatic here yeah you know I think the only thing I can say

about last night is that even in the rebuild years it would have been a notably bad game like I oh it was bad well the thing that makes it worse is that it was a pretty quiet NHL night like they were for the most part they were sort of I mean they were the national game but they were it was mostly you know everyone kind of had their eyes glued to that game in particular so it wasn't like if it was on a you know on a Saturday or something there's like eight games going on at once it's kind of easier to to sort of go unnoticed a little bit although I guess when you're giving up eight goals people are going to eventually start cracking jokes on Twitter but here we are yeah it's um you know what the other funny thing is mostly for these shows

I sort of have like a a bit of a rundown or guiding notes to lead us in different directions and for this one I mean it's it's such a tire fire that I honestly decided not to make any notes. We're just going to kind of freewheel it and see where it takes us. Yeah, that sounds good. You just point me in the right direction and who will pick it apart. You're the right man to talk to about this, to do this oilers deep dive with because,

you know, obviously you follow this team very closely and we've had countless conversations about this team on this podcast in the past, but you also wrote just a mind-blowingly deep 20 game review of their season so far. I don't even know. I can't even imagine how many words that was or how long it took you to do. But it was pretty thorough, man. I feel like you kind of covered all the bases. So I guess we'll just do sort of an audio book version of that. And we'll just go kind of from top to bottom and try to figure out what's gone wrong, what's gone right, and sort of this team's outlook both

for the rest of this season and moving ahead as well. That sounds great. All right. Well, I guess that's a good sort of guiding question. for us here what's gone wrong right because heading into the season um people were obviously very excited and optimistic about this team i mean they just had their most successful season in ages and look good doing so and you know having a player like connor macdavid in tow will let your imagination run a while and i believe they had the best stanley cup odds for any western conference team they were second just behind the penguins and you and i did a did a podcast before the year where we weren't we weren't doing a power rankings for this season we were more so doing an organizational power rankings or which team you'd want to take over and you were immensely high on the Edmonton Oilers and I was I was high on them as well I have to admit but I feel like I had at least a few more reservations and sort of the startling thing to me is that all of the reasons you would have had for sort of kind of stepping on the brakes or kind of being cautious in your optimism

of them have come to fruition and were only a quarter of the way through the season. Like it took so little time for pretty much all of those concerns to materialize. Well, and the thing is, the things that I really liked about the Oilers in the off-season when we were looking at sort of this long-term, which team would you most like to take over? Those things all still stand, like, and particularly McDavid Dry-Sidal, but there are other positives on the roster that are there. but I feel like we all, there were a lot of people

sounding the alarms in the off season just to kind of dampen expectations a little bit. People who are saying things like the Oilers schedule last year was easier than it regularly is. The Oilers had basically perfect health last season, which never happens. Nobody manages to stay that lucky long term.

Camp Talbot played just an insane number of games and played brilliantly the whole year. A bunch of guys had career years. And it's interesting to me that the guys who had career years all ended up getting kept, and all the guys who you might have expected to rebound got shipped out of town. That's interesting is one word for Jonathan. Yes, well, we'll find other words along the way. But the thing about it is when you do that,

like any team's going to have a mix of players that are having ups and downs in any given year. And when you take out all the guys who had downs and just keep the guys who had ups, it reduces the ability of your team to compensate when those guys who had the ups come kind of regress to the mean, right? You don't have regression working both ways because you got rid of all the guys who were going to be better. So there were reasons for caution and everything has been borne out. and then you have six to eight players who have had just really bad years and you mix it and particularly the goaltender which is always a killer but then you mix in some bad fortune because they do have great shot metrics their chance metrics aren't as great as their shot metrics but they're still good but you mix in some poor fortune with that they're not so good they can outrun uh you know a sort of a poor shooting percentage run and a poor goaltending run simultaneously So there's a lot there's a lot there I think if you told me that they were going to be down from their their points a year ago Even that they would have struggled to make the playoffs I wouldn't have been greatly shocked even though I really believe in the team's core long term But to have them where they are I I don't think anybody saw that coming

Yeah and well I mean the troubling thing Spinning it forward would be you know whenever you have the type of expectations that the Oilers had, whether they were just or not, heading into the season and you come up this short, it's very hard to sort of kind of take a step back. And if you're running the team or if you're associated with them to take a step back and sort of take a bigger picture of you and preach patience because, you know, your job is on the line and you're in the hot seat and you're feeling a ton of pressure.

And I imagine there's a lot of incentive to make some sort of a move that you're shows that, you know, you're doing your job and you're trying to get the team out of this funk, and that's generally sort of the worst thing you can do because that's sort of overreactionary thing where you're dealing from a, you know, a place of weakness or desperation tends to lead to kind of a compounding effect where you're just sort of adding on to your woes. And I bring that up because... Like you do something like Trade Hall for Larson because you need a defenseman, right? Exactly.

And well... Something crazy. And I mean, let's not even get to the topic of trading for need, which just drives me up a wall always. I mean, just acquire, how about this? This is a crazy idea, Jonathan. How about just get a team with as many good players as you can, regardless of where they play? And then just let the talent win out and figure everything out later rather than just trying to get, you know, second pairing defensemen and third liners and all this stuff. I mean, it just drives me crazy.

And NHL teams do that. But now, I mean, you know, you're hearing all these reports that the Oilers are in. in the market for a defenseman again. Obviously, it's very easy to make a lot of, you know, Ryan Nugent Hopkins one-for-one jokes, but I feel like those jokes might be a bit too on the nose. Like, I don't know, it seems like... Well, I mean, seriously, if you woke up tomorrow and Ryan Nugent Hopkins had been traded for David Savard one-for-one, that's really not out of step with what the GM has done in the past.

Yeah. It's not a joke. It's not so farcical that you can't believe it. Oh, boy. that would yeah so that but that's exactly what I mean where it's I feel like at this point if you're trading Ryan Nugent Hopkins who has as as you alluded to in your in your 20 game breakdown his results have been mixed this year as as much of the teams but at least you know the percentages have been in his favor so the coach has been talking him up so maybe that'll kind of save them from themselves in terms of making a panic move with him but he does seem like the most obvious candidate yeah it You have to be careful not to read too much into the, or I guess not to draw too direct a line between the percentages and the coach talking him up. I think the percentages have probably increased Eugene Hopkins stock generally within the organization. But Todd McClellan has always been a fan.

Like last year when there were all kinds of criticisms, or last year or two years ago, anyway, whenever there have been criticisms of them along the line, the coach has stepped up and said, no, I really believe in this player. So that at least is not a change But I did make the joke That the percentages might trick the Oilers Into doing the right thing with Newton Hopkins Yeah Okay, so if I know the if I know the PDOCest listeners right now

They're waiting with braided breath for us to deliver someone's head on a silver platter And I mean someone There's a lot of blame to go around when things go this poorly I mean I'm I'm I'm gonna standings here where the Oilers at right now I mean they're 28th in the league In points and I

I believe, yeah, only Arizona, Buffalo and Montreal have a worse goal differential than them. So things are pretty bleak and we need to start divvying out some of the blame for what's gone wrong here. So where do you want to start with that? Who is on the top of your list in terms of when you're kind of pointing the finger? Well, it's probably the guy at the top of the organizational depth chart, the general manager. He made so many. the problem with the GM is that he's never been trying to build the best team he could build.

He has consistently, and it's not even just one deal, you can point to three, four deals where he has leaked talent in the name of addressing specific things and getting bigger and getting better defensively and knocking those goals against down, even when it means that you have a bigger loss, on the Goals foreside, which matters just as much. Particularly this season,

man, Jordan Eberle for Ryan Strom, did not look like a good trade at the time. We talked about it over the summer. It looks like an even worse trade now. And that's not the people say, well, you know, that's not the one thing that would, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, uh, that doomed the oilers. No, it, it, it isn't. But, you know, Jordan Eberlay, he's on pace for, for 25 plus goals again. and Ryan Strom is, you know, drowning as a third-line center. So it was a bad deal at the time.

It looks worse now. Chris Russell got a four-year, $4 million per extension in the off season, along with no-move protection. He got bumped to the third pairing five games into the year. So that's not ideal. Milan-Luchich has not been great. Not addressing the Sakurai injury has not been great. there have been a ton of problems with that in well i mean in in peter shirelli and milan luch's

defense i mean uh plotting big physical forwards who are about to turn 30 and have another five plus years on their deal i mean that's that's bound to work out well in the years to come i mean i feel like his best years are still ahead of them it's funny when they like two weeks before they signed luchich i wrote a piece for the when i was with the journal i wrote a piece for them about how the best case scenario for the Oilers would be Milan Luchich signing a long-term extension with the L.A. Kings because Edmonton was this up-and-coming king team in L.A. was one of these clubs that had to pass. And if they had that albatross there, that would make it easier for the Oilers to do that. Well, no.

Not so much. I mean, sometimes we can get in trouble when we're evaluating GMs. You know, obviously hindsight always works in our favor, and it's easy to kind of look back and quibble with stuff but the reason why I feel comfortable with singling out Peter Shirley in the job he's done here is because a lot of this stuff as I mentioned is was sort of predictable in the summer and and predicted. Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean.

Actually predicted this. It's like it's yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, people like you and I were going on this podcast and writing articles and doing various radio hits and we were like, you know, Jordan Eberley will bounce back. There's no way that a player with his age and his career track. record just all of a sudden in one season forgot how to play hockey. And, you know, as much as I was beating that drum, I still take remarkable joy in seeing just how neatly the regression has happened, where he's pretty much back to his

exact career averages if you take out last season. And so that's not good, obviously. I mean, the defense, as you wrote, is a problem because the Andre Secra injury happened in the playoffs, and we knew all summer that this was going to be an issue. And they sort of made this bet on their internal options. And, you know, garlic darnel nurse has rewarded them to some degree. And he's looked very good. And that sort of provides optimism.

But then the kind of on the flip side, they're also betting on a guy like Matt Benning. And he's just absolutely imploded this year. And they don't really, they just haven't addressed it. And they sort of have been comfortable just letting that happen. And obviously when something like that is going on, you can't be surprised that the results are bad. I mean, we saw it coming. and it's kind of playing out right before our very eyes. Yeah, absolutely.

And I feel like that almost neatly transitions us over to the next guy on the hit list, which would be the coach. The usage of the players has been really interesting in some cases. So there was a lot of talk in the summer about Ryan Strom playing on the top line with Connor McDavid. He got one game there in the preseason and the exercise was abandoned. excuse me like the the way this team was built

and Peter Shirelli talked about this in the offseason this was kind of built to be a three strong centers team to have lines that came in waves where you would have a couple of established guys and then you would have a rookie or a lesser proven winger with each of those established pairs and then you might have three strong lines that could attack McClellan has steadfastly refused to do that

the entire season. He made some motions during the preseason. Then in the final preseason warm-up game, he went back to doing what he always does, which was loading up his top line and going to a very rigid top six, bottom six model. He has stuck with it basically the entire year. He's abandoned it two games ago. So I'm very curious how long this lasts because the first two games under the new model have not been great. But that's the way this roster was built and he's never employed it.

the way the GM has envisioned it. We can wonder about why Russell got bumped to the third pairing almost immediately because McClellan loved Russell last year and undoubtedly that was part of the reason he was re-signed. A lot of the new hires, Yusi Okina comes to mind. He was brought in by the GM in the off season, never really trusted by the coach, never put in a top six position. He gets traded for Mike Camilleri. Well, Camilleri is on the fourth line as of last night.

and the young guys that Shirelli has promoted, guys like Jujar Chaira, who's looked really good, guys like Lauren Braswa, who got kind of burned last night in a team-wide collapse. But he's had two starts all year, and one of them was a good start. He's had one good start, one bad start, and everything else has been relief appearances. The coach hasn't been willing to use these guys. So one of the things that has come up a lot is, well, you know,

it's hard to blame the coach because the GM never, gave him the pieces, we don't know that the GM didn't give him the pieces because the coach has never seemed interested in executing the plan that the GM laid out in the offseason. So as much as I don't like a lot of what Shirelli has done, I have to cut him a little bit of slack in that his coach has never executed the game plan the way he drew it up. Right. And we see that with the best organizations in any sport that, you know, there's sort of everyone's working in lockstep where the GM and the coach have a plan or agreement to the players you're getting. I mean, they're only going to be so good as the coach, as what the coach allows them

to be. And that's a big issue. And we need to account for that. And, you know, the thing that's really stuck out to me watching this Oilers team is that beyond, beyond McDavid and, you know, a few glimpses of a guy like Yamamoto or, you know, weirdly enough, Johanavitu breaking out of his own is how slow this team is and how the pace they play at typically. And, you know, part of that is the players that Shirelli's brought in. And then another issue is, I feel like Todd McClellan's system has also been a bit disappointing in terms of how, sort of how they want to play,

especially with their depth lines where it's a lot of dumping and chasing and sort of trying to play that heavy physical brand of hockey, which is an issue because it obviously, it's a bit, I mean, we've seen teams succeed with it, especially in the Pacific Division, but it does feel a bit outdated.

And it seems like it's kind of weird because this team was build as sort of this young, up-and-coming, fast, talented team, and they don't really play like that. So there's a weird imbalance for me there. Yeah, I'm a big believer in that there are multiple ways to win hockey games, but the thing you should do is

tailor your game plan to the talent you have. The Oilers did not have, like if you imagine L.A. and Chicago as two ends of the spectrum, or L.A. and Pittsburgh, the Oilers did not have an L.A. type team. They had a Pittsburgh or Chicago type roster. And the GM over the years has transformed it from part of the reason they've led so much talent is because he has been forcing an L.A. style roster there.

And part of the problem with their speed, like the dump and chase hockey is really well built for big players, right? Like that's that's one of those kind of game plans where big physical players can have success. But they also got to be able to escape because there is a lot of forechecking. and outside of Anton Slepechev, and this is crazy, but it's pretty true. Drysidal obviously is the exception, but they don't have a lot of big guys who can also get in there really quickly and create havoc for opposition defensemen. By the time Milan Luchich gets in on the forecheck, the puck's long gone most of the time. Right. Yeah, you got to actually catch the guy to hit him.

Yeah, and I feel like I'm beat, and you know what, I should admit some bias here because I'm being pretty, hard on Luchich. I watched watching last night he did a couple things that just drove me up the wall so there's some residual anger here. There was one play where he went in and it was like he leaned on the offensive zone boards for about two seconds while the play was

ongoing before he started the back check following the puck out of the zone and it just just blew my mind so if I'm being overly negative towards him it's probably and there's probably a couple other players who this applies to as well based on last night's game. Just let

it out, man. This is a bit of a therapy session for you, too, above all else. Let it out. Yeah, all right, let's take a quick little break here to hear from a sponsor, and then we'll pick up this conversation because we're just getting started on other things. Anyone can develop high blood pressure. In fact, 7.5 million Canadians live with hypertension every day. The mission of Get Down BP is to bring everyone together with the goal of getting blood pressure down in a fun and interactive way. So join the community at Get Down BP.ca to learn more because getting blood pressure down has never felt so good. A community-based initiative fueled by one of Canada's leading pharmaceutical research-based

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Best of all is my listeners get $20 off their first Seeky purchase today. Just download the Seek app, enter the promo code PDO, and you get $20 off your first Seek purchase. That's promo code PDO today. Now let's get back to the PDOCast. All right, let's pick this discussion back up. So Jonathan, I think the next logical sort of place for us to take this Oilers Deep dive is sort of, you know, we've talked about who's to blame

and all the finger pointing and something that I've seen come up a lot and you can speak on this better than I can because you're kind of more well-versed with the situation but it's it seems like Edmonton Oilers media without naming names seems to love year over year kind of pointing the fingers when things go wrong at the team's best players and this might be like a league-wide trend I'm sure it is but it feels like with Edmonton and its top players this is like it's more heightened or at a greater magnitude I don't know is that fair to say I I don't know if they've done it overall, but it certainly started. In game 20, Connor McDavid had a wretched night.

He's missed some time with the flu and stuff, and there's maybe some understandable reasons for it. But for whatever reason, he had a bunch of really obvious giveaways and bad stuff happening when he was on the ice. And kind of instantly, he was the subject of a ton of criticism. and part of the problem with it was I think, like, I wasn't wild about his individual game, but I don't think that has anything to do really with the Oilers record over 21 games, right? Like, a guy can have a bad game and not be part of the problem. And in some cases, I don't know if it was meant to suggest that he was part of the problem over the 21 games,

or if people just took it that way. But to me, it was legitimate to call him out for the one game and to say, you know what, he wasn't very good here. but the idea that he's to blame for all that's gone on in Edmonton or even really that he's a contributing factor to it, it strikes me as ridiculous. Right, but this is a bit of a recurring trend. I'm sure Taylor Hall is in New Jersey right now listening to this podcast,

just kind of nodding his head in approval. That's why I come on in the show. It's all about sending subtle signals to Taylor Hall as he listens in New Jersey. Yes. Yeah, I mean, it just seems weird to me to blame a guy who's on pace for 100, and two points this season and obviously you know there's more to the game than that but even if he hasn't uh you know been at his A game all year or if he hasn't sort of taken an even bigger leap than he did from from 2016-17 um he's still been pretty damn good and I feel like there's a lot

uh other things we could kind of point to as the reason for what's gone wrong I mean I don't know it's especially with the defensive side of things it just seems weird to me that like I understand that the top guys have high expectations of them but I don't know I did like whenever the whenever the best player is blamed for a team I'm always like thinking to myself in the back of my head well if the players who were worse than the best player were a bit better maybe they wouldn't be in the situation to begin with well it's it's the same thing that happened in Toronto with Phil Castle right like this this really is a league-wide thing where the failings of a team get placed on the shoulders of the team's best player even though usually if everybody was more like

that guy they'd have less problems. And it's weird how whipping boys sort of emerge from the group. So like Oscar Clefbaum, who's another one of those better players, but he really has to have a down year in a lot of ways. But he's kind of emerged as the focal point of criticism in Edmonton. You don't hear a lot about Chris Russell, who makes the same amount of money and is on the third pairing. When Adam Larson has a terrible game as he did against St. Louis on Tuesday, there's not, usually a lot of attention placed on it. Like, McDavid got called out after game 20 when he played poorly,

but Larson was maybe the worst, well, him and Clefbaum were probably the two worst defenders on the ice against the blues. And Clefbaum got pointed to a lot, but not nearly so much Larson. It's unbalanced. Anytime you take a team failing and you put it on one guy, even if that one guy is struggling. Yeah. No, I completely agree with that. There's a lot going wrong. And I wonder what with McDavid, it does feel like a little bit.

you know when he has the year he has last year with a hundred points and wins all these awards and he's only 20 years old i think people sort of naturally assume that at that age like every season there's going to be sort of the stepwise progression where you're going to get better and better every year until you reach your physical prime and sometimes it just doesn't work like that like if i feel like if he was just playing at this level for the like the rest of his career moving forward it would be pretty pretty good i feel like lawyers would still be happy with it it's not like it's going to keep just going to the moon, although, you know, who knows what his ceiling is based on his physical talents.

I think that's a really great point, one that's underappreciated. A lot of times the evolution with players like that who are so good offensively early is in other areas of the game and not necessarily in their point totals. There's a lot of reasons for it going this way, but you look at Sidney Crosby. He had 120 points his second year in the league. He hasn't topped 110 any of the years since. You know, you might have thought, oh, he's going to be a 150 point player. No.

And there are reasons like injuries and the decline in power plays and stuff like that. But yeah, it's not a straight line to the top of these guys. Well, yeah, I remember what was the, there was like a preseason story about McDavid where it was like, what was it, could he get 100 goals or was it 200 points? It was some sort of like absurd total. It's like, no, of course he's not going to get that. No one is doing that. That's just not a fair expectation regardless of how good this guy may be.

So I think kind of settling down a little bit is probably wise. Yeah, so you mentioned clefbaum. there and he's a good segue for us to get into a discussion about the oilers underlying numbers as a team and you know regression and what we expect from them because you know if you look right now they're i believe third in shot share um and you know their fourth and expected goals and all this stuff and then you look in their 28th in pdo and i think people would mostly be assuming that we would just naturally assume that they're actually really good and they've just been super unfortunate and we should expect them to bounce back and I do think it's fair to assume that they will

eventually start scoring more goals and getting more saves and looking better in the process but I know you've been on this and it's sort of the allocation of those shots that they're getting because as a team they're getting a ton of them but when you look a bit closer um you know it's a lot coming from the defenseman and from the point and maybe I don't know is it fair to assume that their shooting percentages the team might dip accordingly because of that? Can some of that be explained by that, or is it purely just bad luck? I do think it's a combination of factors. People will point to the analytics and say, you know, the team will bounce back.

And I think there's truth in it. But here's one way of framing it. I'm working on a piece right now. If you look at the Oilers top line, in two years under McClellan, they have averaged 68 goals on the year, at even strength. They're on pace for 68 goals again this year. You look at the other three lines. In two years under McClellan, they've averaged 83 goals.

They're on pace for 68 this season. So that's a 15-gold drop. That's almost the entirety. It's not all of it, but that's the vast majority of where the shooting percentage drop is coming. That and on defense, and you don't expect defensemen to post-high shooting percentages. And when you look at what they've done with their bottom nine, that includes guys, like Jordan Eberle, that includes guys like Benoit, players with a little bit more skill, and you look at who they have down there, I think they'll be better. I don't think Mark

Letestu's going to go the whole year without being on the ice for a goal four. But there are real talent limitations, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if this team came in with a shooting percentage a little bit below the league average at five on five. Yeah, which would obviously still represent a massive improvement from where they are. Yeah, from where they are. Yeah, that's why I kind of wonder if you know i mean it was still so early on and as bad as they've looked it's sometimes easy to overreact to that and have the lasting image in your mind of you know they're giving up eight goals to the blues and all this stuff's going horribly wrong and you're thinking that you know the world's going to come to an end and they can't get out of this but i mean there's still

60 games left and you know the western conference especially in the pacific in the wildcard seems to be pretty wide open like a lot of the teams that are ahead of them right now certainly have their own flaws as well and you know we expect Vegas to come crashing back down earth eventually and Calgary has their own defensive issues and you know Anaheim is staying afloat right now but they have a ton of injuries and it's still going to be a while until they get Getslaff and Kessler back and who knows that they can hold the forward and you go on down the line the Canucks are playing over their heads so it's conceivable that if the Oilers do start getting

some of these bounces they could pull themselves out of this and still salvaged this season, but they have dug themselves such a deep hole. So I'm kind of trying to weigh those two things in my expectations for them moving forward. Yeah, I think the standings are misleading at this time of year in terms of how big of a hole it is. So we say seven points and you're like, well, that's not very much. But if you imagine the wild card team, so we'll pick the ducks, because that's a good example there, and you imagine them that they continue playing at the pace that they're playing right now. They don't improve when guys get back. They just keep plugging along at a 10, 7, and 3 record.

It's going to take Edmonton, I haven't done the math, but it's probably eight straight wins to catch up to the pace, right? Right. Maybe more than that. So we say seven points, but those other teams, it's not like Edmonton wins four in a row and all of a sudden they're in it. It's probably more like double that. And, you know, we should point out that I think they'd have to leapfrog what, like seven

teams and- Well, everybody but Arizona, right? Yeah, and given how, um, Given how the league works with a point structure and how many three-point games we see and stuff like that, it's very tough to make up that ground. It seems like, oh, that's just four wins, but it's more than that. There's a bit of nuance to it. Yeah, if we worked under a more rational standing system where every game was worth three points or every game was worth two points,

and you could really make headway by winning a bunch in a row, especially against divisional opponents, yeah, I'd have a lot more time for the Oilers rebounding and eventually making the playoffs. But when I look at the way the system is right now, it's very difficult to overcome even a seven-point hole. It's more difficult than we realize the parity at this point of the season in a lot of cases is false. Yeah, that's fair.

Yeah, is there anything else for us to cover with this team? I mean, we've done like 30 or 35 minutes on this deep dive. I don't know. It's, I feel like we're both sort of lukewarm on it where there's a lot of things that have gone wrong. There's a lot of people to blame. But at the same time, it's probably not as bad as it looks right now. And maybe the, I don't know, like, what's our, what's our, what's our, what's our leading line here for, if we're selling this podcast to our listeners? If it were me, I'd probably say the Edmonton Oilers are going to, are almost certainly, because nothing certain.

and almost certainly going to be better over the last 60 games than they were over the first 20, and significantly better. But they're in such a hole right now that it might not matter. Well, there you have it, Jonathan, there you have it. Has there been, let's send this thing on a positive note. Has there been any team in the Western Conference or in the league that has caught your eye from a positive note that have been a lot better than you thought they were? I mean, I feel like the answer to this might be those very blues we talked about earlier

that put a drumming on the oilers last night. Well, this feels like a good way to bring it full circle, actually, because although I did pick Edmonton very high in our preseason franchise long-term rankings, I had St. Louis really high as well. You did. And that Braden Chen trade, that's turned out far better than I think. And I mean, Chen's riding a PDO wave right now. But even so, that's a fantastic team.

There's a lot of good pieces there. and it's nice to see them having some success for a change. And in a year where the rest of the West looks kind of weak, you can make a pretty good case. They could, I mean, we're 20 games in. So this is crazy early, but you can make a pretty good case for them going on a deep run. Yeah, I mean, you look at the standings right now,

and you know, you have the Chicago's and the San Jose and the Minnesota's sitting out of the playoff picture, and you have Vegas sitting in a second scene in the Pacific. So I'm not sure how long that's going to last. but it's uh it's you know i think you frame the best where um all the games kind of matter evenly and you know if you let this go on for too long you can dig yourself a really deep hole and it's tough to get out of it even if it might not seem like that right now so the blues uh the blues are piling on the winds and that's going to serve them well even if they go on a hot cold streak and some

of these other teams start to catch up on them a bit because uh they're building a pretty big distance between themselves and the rest of the competition yeah and uh because you mentioned Vegas earlier, it's funny. Like St. Louis is 10 points above the wild card cut off right now. They could play just really mediocre hockey for a long time and still probably make the playoffs. A team like Vegas, which has been, you know, lights out good early on, there are only two points above that wild card cutoff.

They're in a lot more danger. So when you look at which team's impressive early standings performance is for real, I don't think it's a big surprise that St. Louis looks a lot more impressive than Las Vegas. Absolutely. All right, Jonathan. plug anything before we get out of here what are you uh what are you working on these days what do you guys have going on at the athletic edmonton yeah we've got a lot going on um i just did a really deep player by player 20 first quarter dive for the oilers i got a got a lot of positive feedback on

that bring a snack and and water if you're going to tread into it and and then today i i put up a piece on todd mcclellan and and just the like the usual move for an nashl team in the oilers position is to fire the coach but it's not that simple in edmonton and i kind of go into why Yeah, well, I highly recommend checking all that out and following your work. And let's get you back on the podcast sometime down the road here. Hopefully when we have more positive things to talk about. Sounds good, Dimitri. All right, chat soon.

The Hockey PDOCast with Dmitri Filipovich. Follow on Twitter at Dim Philipovich and on SoundCloud at soundcloud.com slash hockeypedocast.