It would have been more appropriate if the playing surface had been covered with green felt instead of ice Monday as Dave Tippett rolled out his hockey club for their first practice of the regular season.
Everywhere you looked, the ninth head coach of the Edmonton Oilers in the last 11 seasons has been left rolling the dice.
Tippett is rolling the dice in goal.
He’s tossing the bones on defence.
And he’s casting the ivories on half the spots on the forward lines with new players, all of whom should be wearing question marks on the back of their jerseys, not numbers.
You get the idea. It won’t take much if things go wrong in any of those areas for the 2019-2020 Edmonton Oilers to crap out.
Tippett is going to need to show up behind the bench with a collection of lucky ties and lucky socks Edmonton representatives used to win all those the NHL draft lotteries that resulted in guys like Connor McDavid becoming an Oiler.
The Oilers are doubling down in goal with two maybes instead of one.
Choosing to wait and develop blue-chip defensive hopes for the future in the system may be an about-time philosophy that new GM Ken Holland is bringing here, but it doesn’t suggest dramatic improvement for now, next week or next month.
And gambling on inexpensive European veterans such as Joakim Nygard, Tomas Jurco and Gaetan Haas, with no NHL experience, along with reclamation project James Neal up front where they gambled and lost with the likes of Ty Rattie, Jesse Puljuvarvi, Kailer Yamamoto, Ryan Spooner and Tobias Rieder last year.
It was hard to convince yourself that the Oilers had succeeded in making chicken salad out of chicken feathers as Tippett rolled out his regular-season team to prepare for the lid-lifter for the Oilers 41st NHL season against the Vancouver Canucks.
When the session was over I asked the Tippett to contrast what he thought he had to work with when he chose to take the job to the team and again when he took the team to training camp and now as he send them out for the first of 82 games.
“Ever evolving,” he said.
“And it’s going to continue to evolve.
“You put names on a whiteboard with who you figure will play with who. Then you get to training camp and start putting those things in place and some aren’t as good as you figured they might be and others are better than you expected. As you come through training camp evaluating every guy, and get a sense of what they can do and what they can’t do, where they might fit.
“The next part of it is to try to determine where you think some of them can go. There’s some guys here who I think have more than what we’ve seen,” he said of the newcomers, mostly veteran pros from Europe with zero NHL experience.
“What we’re dealing with here is an evolution of our group that’s not done yet.”
Everybody in Edmonton knows what has to happen here this year to result in the Oilers not establishing a new NHL record for futility by missing the playoffs for the 13th time in 14 years.
It’s not one thing. It’s an entire shopping list of things.
Last year Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins all had career years yet the Oilers finished 35-38-9 for 79 points and finished 25th overall, and missed the playoffs by a dozen points.
The Oilers were a major mess on the penalty kill, 30th overall at 74.8 percent. They were 20th in goals per game at 2.79, and only five other teams were worse in goals against at 3.30. In the faceoff circle the Oilers finished 25th in the league.
On the other hand, the Oilers finished ninth on the power play at 21.2 percent and the addition of Joel Persson and/or Ethan Bear as playmaking right shot defencemen are exciting possibilities there.
But can McDavid, Draisaitl and The Nuge all stay healthy and return and enjoy career years again?
Draisaitl had a 50-goal season. McDavid ended up at 41 and Nugent-Hopkins finished with 28.
McDavid ended up with 116 points Draisaitl with 105 and Nugent-Hopkins had 69. Individually, you’d figure the odds are against all three having a career year again, especially the Tippett having made Job 1 to dramatically cut down on the goals against.
Together, the Big Three produced 119 goals and 290 points. As a trio can they return and make it 300?
Last year the Oilers gave up 274 goals. They allowed 42 more than they scored despite all that production by McDavid, Draisaitl and Nugent-Hopkins.
As usual the teams that made the playoffs all had plus totals in the for-against stats and the teams that missed had minus stats.
Colorado caught the eighth and final playoff position with a plus 14. Arizona finished ninth and out of the Stanley Cup tournament at minus -10.
It’s not rocket science.
The Oilers were 20th in goals per game at 2.79 and only five other teams were worse in goals against at 3.30.
And then there’s the goaltending.
Anybody see any evidence that Mikko Koskinen has solved his high glove side weakness? And Mike Smith is still 37 years old and missed most of camp with an illness.
Koskinen ended up with an .864 save percentage in the pre-season and Smith an .868. You don’t make the playoffs with two goalies under .900, no matter how you divide up their workload.
So what about all that, coach?
“I think we’ve made some steps through camp to help our goals against and to help our penalty kill.
“The personnel we’ve brought in to help our penalty kill, I don’t mind saying, are penalty killers. They’re not just guys doing it because there’s nobody else here to do it. They’re penalty killers,” he said of Josh Archibald, Markus Granlund, Patrick Russell and Colby Cave.
“Both goalies worked hard and we’ll see where that goes with the save percentage. I like what both have done. They’re both going to play. And they’re both going to get a chance to improve their goals against.
“The combination of playing a better defending game and better penalty killing should result in better goaltending.”
“On the dot through the pre-season games we’ve been pretty good. We’ll get a challenge in our first game against Vancouver. They’ve got four good NHL centres, two lefts and two rights, and that will be a challenge for us.
“And it’s not just the centremen. It’s what happens off the draw. We’ve talked about that. We’ve talked about that a lot.”
And there’s the veteran Europeans new to the small ice surface and the no-time-to-think NHL games featuring the best players in the world.
“I had a talk with Haas. He’s a 27-year-old guy who has played a lot of big international games. We were laughing. He said, ‘My first game people were flying around,’ and he was mesmerized by it. You saw him in his last game and he was getting it. It’s hard for a centreman. Not only are you coming into a different culture and a different style of play, you’re coming into a smaller ice surface, different coaching and the best league in the world.
“Haas is going through it. Nygard is getting better every game. He has good tenacity on the puck and his hands are great. There’s a lot of upside there,” said Tippett.
“It’s a challenge. Joel Persson got hurt so he moved down a little bit. But these guys are good players. They’re smart players. They’re not kids anymore. They’ve come here and it’s still a challenge for them to get on this team.”
Predicting how this Oilers season will end up is a fool’s exercise because the “ever evolving” team Holland is giving Tippett to take into the season might not look like anything like the one he’ll coach in Game 82, especially if the developing young talent knocks the door down with the way they play in Bakersfield. But most people probably wouldn’t pick the team Tippett had on the ice Monday to make the playoffs.
Whatever, ready or not, here they come.
“I like our team. I think we’re a very motivated group,” said Tippett.
“I don’t think many people are picking us to do much. I think our group feels that.
“I like some of the new energy we have. I think that’s picked up from last year’s group. Our bottom-six forwards I think are better suited to have the jobs we want them to do in the penalty-killing role. I like where we’re at as we get it going here. We have lots of growth left and I don’t mind where we are.”
As for your correspondent, I’m darn sure not going to offer to write that I’ll eat my column with sauerkraut, sour cream and bitter lemon.
At best, I’ll say I’m from Missouri.
Then again, come to think of it, the St. Louis Blues, the NHL team from Missouri, the worst team in the NHL on the morning of Jan. 3 last year, won the Stanley Cup.
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October 01, 2019 at 07:12AM
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