BOOOOOO Edmonton Oilers, BOOOOO Oilers.
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Dan403
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BlackDogg
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What i always suspected, that Eberle causes or gives up as many goals as he creates.
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Is it though? People get fixated on the numbers and think. Theres an objective look at it.What a great post.
The numbers tell a halfbaked and incomplete story. Fact of the matter is the Oilers threw a set of 3 rook players out on a line together in the hardest conference in the NHL and said "have fun swimming" You'll note that virtually no other team anywhere does this.
so predictably, and without any other mentoring, the kids do what they know how to do, produce, because that's all they got sans veteran influence or assistance.
Years later the same players are castigated for high GA when in fact many players in the league with high production end up having high GA. its often part of the territory. But its GUARANTEED to be whats going with 3 rooks finding their legs joined at the hip. I mean what else was going to occur?
Next, this has been a losing team the entire time these kids were here. Anybody slotting in here at topsix is going to have considerable GA playing other topsix opponents and not having the type of lineup, D, or goaltending that matches up well. So sink or swim becomes sink, and predictably.
Then look at this team having no shutdown line through most of the kids tenure. meaning that the kids are put out against topsix on purpose by this club. We're not sure to what end other than accumulating further #1 picks..
Its not GF, or GA that matter. Its differential. For instance this year Hall has a high GA, to be expected, but is on ice for more GF. Pretty impressive actually for a team as bad as this and that has a huge minus in team +/-
A full look also has to consider what the respective players relative contribution is on the clubs i.e. does the team do better with X player on the ice or off. GFON GFOFF should be quoted in such an indepth look. Also whether the players On differential is better than their Off differential. Despite Hall and Eberle generally having high GA their production counters that somewhat in that GF career wise has been very close to GA. Again on a very bad team.
Would take a lot of computing but Hall and Eberle should not be compared to a norm of zero, i.e. zero +/-. They should be compared with what the entire Oilers EV toi has delivered during their tenure here. Considering that playing topsix is of course a higher event activity and that theres going to be more goals scored in those minutes.
Finally, I encourage anybody to take a look at the top GA forwards in the league. Now compare it to the top producers in the league. The list often looks nearly identical with say 75% of players being on both lists.
Fact of the matter is relationship between pts obtained by a player, and GA by a player shows strong correlation.
See above. What else would be the case?
From my own pov I've cited Eberles GA this season. I've done so because there are different expectations of the coaching staff this season for players to play more of a complete game. i'd be more prepared to throw out past years with the Eakins bathwater but results this year, and going forward are still of concern.
Its always been my opinion that the best players in the league are not the top producers, but the players that overcome opposition and are associated with considerably higher GF than GA. The Kopitars, Datsyuks of the league. Those are the best but its moot point because nobody gives up those.
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Eberle's GF/60 is right there as well in that post. He produces at around ~2.7 GF/60, which ranks him around ~120th league wide year-to-year. The real telling part of this is that, historically, Hall-RNH-Ebs have been together. Which means we are putting out 18M in a single line that is actually hurting our team against their distribution of matchups/competition. So, relative contributions will be flawed because the Oilers, more so than any other team, are so top heavy; they give their top players the absolute maximum opportunity to succeed, at the expense of the rest of the team. This is completely opposite to the truly elite players/teams, where their top players always "carry bums". Think Crosby's wingers. Kopitar's wingers. Prime Datsyuk's wingers. They actively "sacrifice" their top players, but their top players still rise above and (in the case of these 3 in particular) they still dominate their matchups even though they dont have the entire complement of their team's best resources to play with.
This means that when we play this line against the Bickell/Saad/Shaw-Toews-Hossa type lines of years past, we are spending more of our cap than our opponents on that power-on-power matchup. Ideally, you would win the matchup when you have your 3 most expensive assets paired together, but it isnt the case. The Toews line had a cap hit average of around ~13M, meaning the Hawks had an extra 5M to throw around on the rest of their team, to improve the rest of their team with. There is actually no other line in the league with the caphit of our historical first line (until now, with Toews's new 10.5M caphit, and Kopitar's as well). And yet, our first line consistently lost the power-on-power every single year.
So, not only are we giving our top line every opportunity to succeed, at the expense of the rest of the team, they are still not succeeding, and outright failing, to be completely honest and frank about it. So, media and fans, naturally, look to the rest of the lineup and how they are not as good, without even acknowledging that the configs of 6M-6M-6M are actively contributing to weakened team depth. No other team in the league configures their team to cater to their top players so much, and yet, our top line still doesnt outproduce.
The problem with the Oilers is and always has been it's top players. They simply are not good enough. Truly elite players carry their "scrub" linemates; they cause fans to wonder why Justin Abdelkader is playing on prime Pavel Datsyuk's wing when he has stone hands. They cause fans to laugh at Kopitar's revolving door of 10 different wingers/season. Not because Carter-Kopitar-Williams can't work, but because Kopitar doesn't need them to dominate at ES. Kopitar can take a Jordan Nolan or Dwight King or Trevor Lewis or Dustin Brown on his wing for games at a time because he will elevate them. Because with a 10M first line, he can still outplay the Oilers 18M first line.
Edit: Another way to think about this is everyone (from media to fans to the players themselves (I remember Eberle complaining about the team's depth)) keeps blaming the Oiler's depth and how their third and fourth line always suck. But they are weak because our first line (historically, it's a little different now) always used so many of the team's resources. We never put the onus on our top guys to actually do the hardest lifting. This type of configuration would be ok if the "stacked" top end would actually dominate their matchup cover up the lower end bleeding with their own production, but our top 6 (and the historical first line in particular) has always lost their matchup, despite eating all of the team's resources. No one on our team plays as tough a role as, say, Kopitar or Datsyuk. People think that the "hard minutes" are the same for each team. That someone on all teams is simply going to play the 'hard minutes" and that is that. But the hard minutes are not created equal. No one on our team actually plays extremely hard minutes. Yet, we still lose in our matchups. One day, McDavid hopefully can develop and eat those matchups, but right now no one does/can.
This means that when we play this line against the Bickell/Saad/Shaw-Toews-Hossa type lines of years past, we are spending more of our cap than our opponents on that power-on-power matchup. Ideally, you would win the matchup when you have your 3 most expensive assets paired together, but it isnt the case. The Toews line had a cap hit average of around ~13M, meaning the Hawks had an extra 5M to throw around on the rest of their team, to improve the rest of their team with. There is actually no other line in the league with the caphit of our historical first line (until now, with Toews's new 10.5M caphit, and Kopitar's as well). And yet, our first line consistently lost the power-on-power every single year.
So, not only are we giving our top line every opportunity to succeed, at the expense of the rest of the team, they are still not succeeding, and outright failing, to be completely honest and frank about it. So, media and fans, naturally, look to the rest of the lineup and how they are not as good, without even acknowledging that the configs of 6M-6M-6M are actively contributing to weakened team depth. No other team in the league configures their team to cater to their top players so much, and yet, our top line still doesnt outproduce.
The problem with the Oilers is and always has been it's top players. They simply are not good enough. Truly elite players carry their "scrub" linemates; they cause fans to wonder why Justin Abdelkader is playing on prime Pavel Datsyuk's wing when he has stone hands. They cause fans to laugh at Kopitar's revolving door of 10 different wingers/season. Not because Carter-Kopitar-Williams can't work, but because Kopitar doesn't need them to dominate at ES. Kopitar can take a Jordan Nolan or Dwight King or Trevor Lewis or Dustin Brown on his wing for games at a time because he will elevate them. Because with a 10M first line, he can still outplay the Oilers 18M first line.
Edit: Another way to think about this is everyone (from media to fans to the players themselves (I remember Eberle complaining about the team's depth)) keeps blaming the Oiler's depth and how their third and fourth line always suck. But they are weak because our first line (historically, it's a little different now) always used so many of the team's resources. We never put the onus on our top guys to actually do the hardest lifting. This type of configuration would be ok if the "stacked" top end would actually dominate their matchup cover up the lower end bleeding with their own production, but our top 6 (and the historical first line in particular) has always lost their matchup, despite eating all of the team's resources. No one on our team plays as tough a role as, say, Kopitar or Datsyuk. People think that the "hard minutes" are the same for each team. That someone on all teams is simply going to play the 'hard minutes" and that is that. But the hard minutes are not created equal. No one on our team actually plays extremely hard minutes. Yet, we still lose in our matchups. One day, McDavid hopefully can develop and eat those matchups, but right now no one does/can.
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Checked out
I follow all of what you're saying. Just noting you did not tell the whole story and that you seemingly made conclusions based on limited narrative. Sure Eberles GA is high. Anybody would expect that. The 18M is a bit of a misnomer as that's the teams fault for signing such deals so presumptuously. Its also considered that these are contracts that give back return in the later years of the contracts where it was thought having those guys at that price would be a bargain and allow quite a lot to supplement. All this occurred before McDavid. The org thought they were paying that money out to who they thought would be the best players. Luck of McDavid pick has changed all that.
Next, it inaccurate to state that the 18M has actually impacted the teams depth. Lack of ability finding better additions than say Sekera's or Gryba's on D have impacted the teams depth. The Oilers in anycase still had ample capspace in Chias offseason to sign whoever they wanted. They were not really cap limited in that respect. Maybe they are now because of new contract commitments that other than Talbot haven't been so hot.
Couldn't agree more with you regarding Kopitar with the exception that people here don't realize that Dustin Brown is also a player you can pair up with lesser players and still have a competitive line that swims. That said the comparison is entirely unfair as the Kings are a unique example of even the best, and highest paid talent buying in very much to team first approach. A guy like Carter, truly a fantastic player as well, doesn't care how many goals he gets as long as gets the team to the playoffs and he contributes there.
Doughty similar is all team first.
To me Kopitar and Doughty have been the best players in hockey in recent years. But as I stated its moot consideration.
It's all a mindset, and its present in even the fans. Whenever we try to put our top players in these kind of positions, our fans are the first to make excuses. This eventually gets to the media, and the coach eventually feels the pressure
Hall-Drai-Pakarinen for 3 game, Hall-Drai-Kassian for 2 games, etc
Letestu on the PP.
Fans are the first to say stuff like "LOL why are XXXXX playing in this situation" "What a dumb coach" When the team is still losing, coach looks bad and these things are easy to point to and puts even more pressure on the coach.
When all the coach is trying to do is balance out his lineup. Seeing if his top players can actually compete with the best player in the league in similar configs/situations as the other top players in the league have to deal with. Compete on your matchup with a Pakarinen or with a Korpi on your wing, so that we can actually compete on the third matchup as well. That's what a Thornton-Pavelski-Donskoi or a Couture-Ward-Donskoi do. Or Thornton-Rookie Hertl did. Always the team coming before the individuals, the individual points and such.
But here, as soon as they were split, they would actually go to the media and ask to be put back together; the splits never happened for more than a few games at a time. They wanted to produce. And they did, but because they did, no one else on the roster could. Partly because they are not very good, but also partly because we are using all of our resources on our first line.
For us to actually have been successful these last 5 years this is what would have needed to have happened, just think about how unrealistic this is:
Our bottom 6 would have to have been so much better than their competition distribution (which included a decent amount of top 6 and top line assignments because, again, our top line doesn't truly match power-on-power), that they would have had to completely dominate whenever they were on the ice. And they would have had to do this while spending less relative cap space% than other team's, because, again, our first line had used more cap% relative to the rest of the league than anyone else. On top of this, they would have had to make up the deficiencies of our expensive, stacked top line that was (historically) always losing their own matchup.
What we were asking of our bottom 6, put plainly, was to dominate their matchups, while spending pennies on their salaries, and hoping that they carried our top 6 in the process. All with little to no PP time as well.
And when they, of course, couldnt do this, they take the brunt (most cases all) of the blame to top it all off. Just a debacle of a situation here in Edmonton
Hall-Drai-Pakarinen for 3 game, Hall-Drai-Kassian for 2 games, etc
Letestu on the PP.
Fans are the first to say stuff like "LOL why are XXXXX playing in this situation" "What a dumb coach" When the team is still losing, coach looks bad and these things are easy to point to and puts even more pressure on the coach.
When all the coach is trying to do is balance out his lineup. Seeing if his top players can actually compete with the best player in the league in similar configs/situations as the other top players in the league have to deal with. Compete on your matchup with a Pakarinen or with a Korpi on your wing, so that we can actually compete on the third matchup as well. That's what a Thornton-Pavelski-Donskoi or a Couture-Ward-Donskoi do. Or Thornton-Rookie Hertl did. Always the team coming before the individuals, the individual points and such.
But here, as soon as they were split, they would actually go to the media and ask to be put back together; the splits never happened for more than a few games at a time. They wanted to produce. And they did, but because they did, no one else on the roster could. Partly because they are not very good, but also partly because we are using all of our resources on our first line.
For us to actually have been successful these last 5 years this is what would have needed to have happened, just think about how unrealistic this is:
Our bottom 6 would have to have been so much better than their competition distribution (which included a decent amount of top 6 and top line assignments because, again, our top line doesn't truly match power-on-power), that they would have had to completely dominate whenever they were on the ice. And they would have had to do this while spending less relative cap space% than other team's, because, again, our first line had used more cap% relative to the rest of the league than anyone else. On top of this, they would have had to make up the deficiencies of our expensive, stacked top line that was (historically) always losing their own matchup.
What we were asking of our bottom 6, put plainly, was to dominate their matchups, while spending pennies on their salaries, and hoping that they carried our top 6 in the process. All with little to no PP time as well.
And when they, of course, couldnt do this, they take the brunt (most cases all) of the blame to top it all off. Just a debacle of a situation here in Edmonton
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rboomercat90
Registered User
Davidson is AHL fodder and will cost the team wins if he's even on the team next season?
Not that I agree with him but I think he meant the other Davidson, Kevin Quinn.
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