07/06/13 Why I Hate the Ference Contract, and Other Things I Do Like

I returned from a month-long early summer hibernation to find that the Oilers were up to their old tricks again - even though they jettisoned Steve Tambellini! Imagine! Some good things happened too, but that stench of questionable management is still lingering like a tuna sandwich under the couch cushions.

02/25/13 Road Trip Questions

The fabled nine game road trip began with an overtime loss on Monday night, and the Oilers are left with more questions than answers. Nuge snake-bitten? Yakupov with 9:05 of ice time? Khabibulin stealing the starting job? Where did I leave my keys?

09/09/12 The Darkest Period: November 26 to January 21

From November 26th to January 21st of the 2011-12 season the Oilers played a block of games that defined their season. They had a record of 5-18-2. It was their worst stretch of the year, so what the heck happened?

08/16/12 Khabibulin vs. the Defense

Conventional wisdom has it that the Oilers' defense is terrible, and still not good enough for the team to make the playoffs. That's at least partially true. But how much of the defensive weakness of the team can be laid at Nikolai Khabibulin's door? Could more starts from Dubnyk be as good as adding a quality defenseman?

05/23/12 Khabibulin Is Above Average For His Age

The problem? Above average for a 36 to 39 year old still isn't good enough to compete in today's NHL.

04/23/12 Pre-Season Prediction Recap Part Three

Another day, another set of questions to look back on. A lot can change from the pre-season onward, but so far these predictions have been fairly close. In the crystal ball today:


Q: Which player with less than 30 NHL games will play the most in 2011-12?


A: Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.


Simple, and to the point. Nugent-Hopkins had a terrific 62 game rookie season. His 0.84 points per game is second among all 18 year old rookies since the lockout. Only Sidney Crosby was better at such a young age. The next-closest player, Jeff Skinner, scored 0.77 points per game as an 18 year old, but RNH is well clear of him. It's worth noting also that Crosby's number (1.26 points per game) puts him well clear of absolutely everyone else.

There were some surprises in this category, too. Corey Potter, Lennart Petrell, and Anton Lander all saw significant action this past season despite an extreme lack of experience from all three. In fact, only Potter had any NHL games under his belt at all, but they combined for 178 games with the Oilers in 2011-12. Potter and Lander figure to be part of the future, and Petrell was fine in his role. Colten Teubert got into 24 games as well, which is one shy of this qualifying as his rookie year.

Q: Which of the PP and PK is most likely to improve?


A: The powerplay will improve because all of the Oilers' offensive contributors will be a year more experienced and thus faster in their decision making. Also, the best players that have been added over the last number of years are all offensive-minded. Getting Hemsky and Whitney back healthy will help a lot, and so will Nugent-Hopkins if he makes the team. Penalty killing is a bit more cerebral, since it's play away from the puck. The Oilers don't have enough experience to be very good at it just yet.


This one is interesting, because both special teams improved by leaps and bounds over the 2010-11 season. The PK went from 29th at 77% (74 goals against) to 14th at 82.8% (52 goals against). They allowed 22 less goals while killing penalties season over season, despite the fact that Devan Dubnyk's shorthanded save pecentage (0.862) was 63rd in the league and Khabibulin's 0.889 was 53rd.

The top eight penalty killers were Smid, Horcoff, Schultz/Gilbert, Jones, Belanger, Petry, Smyth and Peckham; which was quite different than the group they used in 2010-11. That year the eight most oft used penalty killers were Gilbert, Cogliano, Smid, Peckham, Fraser, Jones, Reddox and Vandermeer. Not one of the 2010-11 group had a faceoff winning percentage north of 50%, and Cogliano led the team in draws taken but won just 41.6% of them. Smyth, Petry and especially Belanger and Horcoff made a big difference here. I personally never saw it coming that Smyth would have such an impact on the PK because he wasn't used as a penalty killer at all in LA. His veteran savvy helped with some of the decision making that occurred while down a man.

As for the powerplay, it improved from 27th at 14.5% (44 goals for) to 3rd at 20.6% (54 goals for). Like the PK, a six percent increase in powerplay efficiency is huge, and it probably should have contributed to more wins than it did. The top ten players used on the powerplay were Eberle, Horcoff, Smyth, Hall, Nugent-Hopkins, Gagner, Potter, Hemsky, Whitney and Petry. Tom Gilbert was also a fixture on the PP before being traded. Last year the powerplay men were Foster, Gilbert, Gagner, Hall, Eberle, Hemsky, Whitney, Paajarvi, Omark and Horcoff.

Gone was the wildly ineffective Kurtis Foster, while Paajarvi and Omark lost their spots to powerplay whiz Nugent-Hopkins and wily veteran Ryan Smyth. RNH added 23 powerplay points in just 62 games, which put him in a tie with ten players for 24th in the NHL. More than anything, the emergence of Hall (21 pp points) and Eberle (20 pp points) as well as adding the Nuge put the powerplay over the top.

The powerplay improved by 24 spots in the overall standings, while the penalty kill climbed 15 spots. Both were much better, but the edge goes to the powerplay.

Q: How many games will Yann Danis start?


A: Three; the same as Martin Gerber. Even if one of Dubnyk or Khabibulin suffers a ten-to-fifteen game injury, Danis won't be pushed ahead of the $3.75 million man or the youngster who needs experience.


Actually, Danis didn't start any games this season, but he did play 32 minutes in a relief effort on February 29th. Two goals got past him on 12 shots, good for a 0.833 Sv%. Once the goaltending was back to full strength Danis was sent back to the farm, where he's been the best goalie in the AHL this season.

Q: Will Khabibulin spend any time in OKC this season or next?


A: If Khabibulin spends any time in OKC it will be next year. If the Oilers were to sign a goalie like Vokoun or Rinne after the season then Khabibulin will be headed south for the winter. Otherwise, management will probably ride it out and wait for Bunz.


Obviously, Khabibulin didn't spend any time in Oklahoma City this year even though his numbers in the latter half of the season were bad enough that he probably deserved to. Pekka Rinne is off the market, which is probably a good thing considering that he got a huge extension at $7 million per year. That kind of contract would be ugly in Edmonton. Tomas Vokoun had a decidedly underwhelming season in Washington, posting his worst save percentage since before the lockout. On the other hand, that save percentage (0.917) is right in line with his career number and it's still better than what the Oilers got from either of their two goalies this year. Signing him in the off season would be extremely risky, however, as he is over 35.

One last year of Khabibulin would seem to be in the cards, so he'll need to be in a greatly reduced role. If he somehow stays respectable, maybe he can be traded at the deadline. Either way the odyssey is almost over.

Next time:

Which Western Conference team is most likely to be worse than the Oilers in 2011-12?
Where do you think the Oilers will finish this season?
Will Ales Hemsky be traded, or will the Oilers re-sign him?

04/21/12 Pre-Season Prediction Recap

Before the 2011-12 NHL season began, a group of bloggers from around the 'Sphere made predictions about how the season would go on The Copper and Blue. As a matter of full disclosure, let's see how I did.

Question One:

"Many fans and of course all of the Edmonton mainstream media have called Steve Tambellini's non-draft off-season a success. Do you agree?"

To paraphrase a long answer:

Yes, because:


- Overpaying a player like Erhoff would have been a bad way to fix the defense, and signing aging free agents would take playing time away from young prospects who need time to develop


- The goaltending situation was left alone so that Devan Dubnyk could get more playing time


- The bottom two lines received a much needed overhaul


- Ryan Smyth was brought back


Most of the panelists agreed that the off season was relatively successful, but also that not enough was done to make the Oilers a playoff team. Last June I argued against signing Cam Barker because he brought less to the table offensively than Tom Gilbert and having been bought out made him risky, but I held out hope that Barker could justify his overly large contract once it was signed. Obviously, he did not.

Christian Erhoff dipped to 32 points in 66 games for Buffalo (0.48 p/g), which is closer to his career total (0.46 p/g) than what he had the year before signing his ten year deal (0.63 p/g). The Sabres paid Erhoff $562,500 per point this season and he didn't put them over the top. The fact that the Oilers didn't go after a big fish like Erhoff or a veteran like Hannan meant that Jeff Petry got into 73 games for the Oilers and developed into a key contributor.

Devan Dubnyk did get into more games this year - 12 more, to be exact (11 starts) - and performed exceedingly well given the circumstances, but I was wrong about keeping Khabibulin. Although his overall save percentage rebounded from 0.890 to 0.910, Khabibulin was atrocious after his early hot streak. After winning 7 of his first 9 games, he went on to win just 5 more all year in 31 starts. Count me among the people who didn't think Khabibulin could continue to be as bad as he was in 2010-11, but he proved that crowd wrong and then some. The workload should have been divided 60-22 in favor of Dubnyk and wasn't, which would have made more sense for a goalie who is 39 years old and had played 743 games before 2011-12.

The removal of Stortini, MacIntyre, Jacques and Fraser were no-brainers, as only one (Fraser) is still in the NHL. Andrew Cogliano's production dipped to 26 points from 35 in 2010-11, and he did it with a new $2.39 million cap hit. His replacement, Eric Belanger, picked up just 16 points for $1.75 million, but at least he was able to win a faceoff. Cogliano was 42% in the dot this year, while Belanger won 55.3% of the time and was a key PK contributor. Nobody could have predicted that Belanger, the personification of consistency, would have such a sub-par season, and he should bounce back next year. Hordichuk did what he does but wasn't very useful, and Eager chipped in 8 goals. Ryan Jones also had a good season, setting a new career high with 33 points and adding 17 goals; earning every bit of his $1.5 million.

Finally, even though Ryan Smyth's return fell flat in the latter half of the season, the Oilers still acquired 19 goals and 46 points in exchange for Fraser and a late pick. That the trade happened can't be credited to Tambellini at all, but the parts that went the other way can. In 67 games for the Kings, Fraser scored just twice and added six assists. That's actually one less goal than he scored in his only year as an Oiler.

***

I became a fan of the full tear-down, scorched earth style rebuild on December 12th of 2009. Ironically, the Oilers had just won a franchise record five straight road games. The trouble was that they left for that road trip in 14th place in the West, and returned from it in 11th place. There was no way that the Oilers were going to continue to win like they just had on the road, so it looked like another year of spinning their wheels. The Oilers went on to lose seven straight and nine of their next ten games, which put them out of the hunt for good.

Since then, I haven't been too perplexed that the team was losing, and so the moves Tambellini made in the 2011 off season made sense from the standpoint that they were going to develop a team from within that would be terrible for a while. That meant playing young players rather than paying veterans, and suffering through some growing pains.

What the Oilers do this off season will be much more heavily scrutinized by everyone, and rightfully so. It's time to start winning in Edmonton.

The recap of predictions will continue throughout the week and we'll revisit the following questions next time:

What expectations should fans have for the Oilers?

If the team doesn't meet those expectations, is anyone's job in jeopardy?

Which Oiler will score at least 40 points? Who will get the most?

Which player will less than 30 NHL games will play the most this season?

Which of the PP and PK is most likely to improve?

How many games will Yann Danis start?

Will Khabibulin spend any time in OKC?

Which Western Conference team is most likely to be worse than the Oilers?

Where will the Oilers finish?

Will Ales Hemsky be traded or signed?