Heard a lot about the MacT conference today but just finished watching it
It really wasn't that bad in my mind
He said a few key things
- They are going to build through the draft and that means having more success in more rounds than the first one which means trading picks is not on the table. Hard to argue with this: Tambellini absolutely wrecked this team's prospect pool and now MacT is left trying to pick up the pieces; he can't do that if he trades all his picks away
- No point in changing coach and again, hard to argue this: after 4 coachs in 5 years at some point you have to stop throwing the coach under the bus and try to get the leadership group to pitch in and he singled out Hall and Eberle needing to get more out of their team mates. Management brought in Ference, Fayne and Pouliot who are tough players to help but it hasn't been enough so far but it's worth noting because it's a new strategy for the Oilers under MacT.
- Making a trade for a C or a D would create a hole elsewhere. Not very surprising and honestly I want to give kudos to MacT for being straight here: no trade will fix the Oilers so there's no point in doing one for the sake of it, especially considering how steep the prices are for top flight players and how everyone is going to be trying to take advantage of the Oilers' desperation
At the end of the day the team was run by incompetent, idiotic buffoons from 2006 to 2013 and it's hard for me not to feel a bit of sympathy for MacT when he gets frustrated at some reporter lumping him in with that group: the guy took a borderline garbage team to game 7 of the SCF but can't undo 7 years of damage in a year and a half. One thing that stood out is why the in hell is Bob Nicholson in charge of internal evaluations? The guy is part of the people who ran the organization into the ground! **** him.
The cold, hard truth is that fixing the Oilers is going to take a good 5 or 6 years and it's not something that PR wants management to tell the fans. You could argue that maybe they ought to but that's not the GM's call, it's the owners.
