Player Discussion Dave Tippett: The Tipping Point

[OilerTitanFan]

Because Bob is the President and he is chief in command. Those other guys are ambassadors.

So in the spring Bob was cursed to death and deserved to be hung on a cross in the sahara. Now he is a folklore hero. Man. 5 wins can really change the perception of a team.

I bet you those ambassadors had a say in the Holland hiring.

 

[Tobias Kahun]

It looks good for now, but remember a lot of these things were said about the Oil last year when Hitch came aboard. They ALSO looked more structured, played with more urgency and effort, backchecking like demons etc for a stretch. Yes there are sublte systemic and schematic wrinkles but it's essentially not as different as people think when it comes to the differences between the way Todd and Hitch WANTED them to play.

It really really boils down to culture, accountability, habits and most importantly BUY IN. Starts at the top. Holland has certain values and standards of what he wants and has likely communicated this with the coaches and the players. Then there's the coaching staff and i believe an underrated aspect right now are a few of the new vets we added. Smith is a very vocal veteran leader. He may be a goalie but he's one of those tendys that have the ability to be as much of an effective leader as a player. He has a strong personality and a strong opinion on how he wants all five players on the ice to play in front of him and he won't be shy to say it or call guys out for not being in position or giving enough effort on the back check etc.

Having a few new veteran voices like Neal, Smith and Sheahan etc help a lot in relaying the message from the coaches and to mentor players with less experience than them. They are all playing fairly well now and more importantly have accepted and fit into their roles which makes a huge difference in how confident they are to deliver their message and how well they will be listened to (see Looch for the opposite). Sheahan could be that stabilizing veteran leader the bottom six needed. Help mentor guys like Khaira. Help new euro vets like Nygard, Haas feel more comfortable. It helps we have older PROs like Nygard in instead of Pooly. You can see how Nygard is a lot smarter and competes harder than Pooly game in game out.

We need our leaders and best players to be complete sold on the new culture and standards. Early on it seems like it's happening especially with guys like Drai and Klef. I'm impressed with how Drai is being quite good and responsible on both sides of the puck and the effort level and urgency is higher.

Hitchcock’s team went downhill when he got injuries to defense.

Larsson down and Russell to the third pairing and were short 2 top 4 D from last year and still rolling.

 

[Zenos]

[QUOTE="rboomercat90, post: 165386793, member: 192487"Tippet is a much better coach than Mclellan. Historically, his teams overachieved while Mclellan’s underachieved. A big part of the reason why is because of him being able to get extra from his non star players, putting them into positions to use their strengths. Mclellan got nothing from those types, didn’t matter who they were because he didn’t see the need to try to look for or match strengths against other teams weaknesses. He believed in plug and play into his system and if it didn’t work he’d blame the player instead of the system. I.[/QUOTE]

Maroon and Kassian revived their careers here and blossomed into important players under TMac. Same with Chiasson to an extent last season. Even Mark Latestu had a 15 goal / 35 point season for us. So no, I don't really see it.

Am I happy that Dave Tippet is our head coach now? Yes absolutely! But there's no reason for revisionist history. Especially after 5 games!

 

[MaxR11]

Hitchcock’s team went downhill when he got injuries to defense.

Larsson down and Russell to the third pairing and were short 2 top 4 D from last year and still rolling.

We've lost Larsson now too and have raw rooks in like Bear and Persson in. It has way more to do with how all five players on the ice are playing with consistent effort, urgency, staying in battles, backchecking hard (consistently), covering for each other on D, working hard to support the puck on offence, working hard to find open ice to be available for the puck carrier on offence etc. Being highly aggressive on team D but smartly aggressive and not running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Biggest difference right now is there is early buy in and trust in one another from the whole team. Culture shift or renewal is taking right now.... it's a matter of if it's sustained when this team hits rough patches (which they will). Will they stay with the buy in and the program during rough times. If they do they should be ok. If not... they will sag like in previous years.

 

[Drivesaitl]

^^Maroon was going to come in here and be successful no matter who the coach was as the situation was he would be getting some quality toi. Maroon in the stints that he had played with talent, was able to play well with that talent. Maroon was an add water and watch it bloom player.

Chiasson was somebody very interested in staying in the league and resurrecting his career.

There is little comparison to those outlier examples of players getting it done here vs what I happening now and ALL players being on board.

The revolving door list of players that didn't work under Hitchcock/McLellan is too long for me to list.

The difference between Tippett and McLellan is Tippett runs better schemes. He's a top hockey strategist. He's an excellent coach at getting players to play the right way and getting them to except and benefit from it. The trouble with a McLellan team is that it'll get the horses going but the supporting cast don't feel so much a part of things. In Tippett coaching is every players effort is integral, and they are all valuable pieces. Players (all) feel more included in a Tippett scheme.

 

[Zenos]

There is little comparison to those outlier examples of players getting it done here vs what I happening now and ALL players being on board.

Look, I'm not here to pump McLellan's tires, there's just no reason to unreasonably throw him under the bus. His (poor) record as Oilers HC speaks for itself - why do we have to now create a new narrative to make him look even worse?

The poster I was responding to said that TMac never got anything out of his non-stars. I provided four examples in Kassian, Maroon, Letestu, and Chiasson. Fact is, all four players played their best hockey under McLellan. And you're going to call them outliers whilst talking about Tippet's 5 game tenure as Head Coach?

 

[McCombo]

Do you have Dom Luszczyszyn preseason ranking for last season? Hockey is one of the toughest sports to get an accurate preseason ranking.

Found it!

18-19 Regular season prediction (And the result)

1. Nashville (8th)
2. Tampa Bay (1st)
3. Toronto (7th)
4. Columbus (13th)
5. Boston (3rd)
6. Winnipeg (10th)
7. Pittsburgh (9th)
8. San Jose (6th)
9. Anaheim ( 24th)
10. Philadelphia (22nd)
11. Florida (19th)
12. Washington (4th)
13. Vegas (16th)
14. Calgary (2nd)
15. Minnesota (21st)
16. Los Angeles (30th)
17. Carolina (11th)
18. St.Louis (12th)
19. Dallas (15th)
20. Chicago (20th)
21. Arizona (18th)
22. Buffalo (27th)
23. Colorado (17th)
24. Edmonton (25th)
25. New Jersey (29th)
26. Islanders (5th)
27. Montreal (14th)
28. Rangers (26th)
29. Vancouver (23rd)
30. Ottawa (31st)
31. Detroit (28th)

I don't know how familiar people here are how he does all his work. He isn't just guessing, he has a model which values every player and prediction comes from it.

 

[Drivesaitl]

Look, I'm not here to pump McLellan's tires, there's just no reason to unreasonably throw him under the bus. His (poor) record as Oilers HC speaks for itself - why do we have to now create a new narrative to make him look even worse?

The poster I was responding to said that TMac never got anything out of his non-stars. I provided four examples in Kassian, Maroon, Letestu, and Chiasson. Fact is, all four players played their best hockey under McLellan. And you're going to call them outliers whilst talking about Tippet's 5 game tenure as Head Coach?

Tippett has got the very best out of his players his entire career. McLellans teams have almost always underachieved. I don't say this after 5 games, I was calling for the Oilers to make the playoffs under Tippett before the season STARTED. Because I have more faith in this coach, and that theres communication with management and that the type of players we bring in can play the type of system the coach is intending to play. A concerted effort. Chiarelli was infamous for being unavailable, for being headstrong, and was often at odds with his coaches.

This is not throwing McLellan, a competent coach under the bus. But Tippett is far better at getting his teams to adhere to systems and for advocating for what he needs. Holland is better at acquiring that. Still, some of the players Holland has brought in probably don't pan out so well in a McLellan run team. Especially in the case of average players, they need systematic help to play better as units. The Oilers units under Tippett are better than their individual parts. Rarely the case with McLellan.

What often used to occur in SJ is they would get exposed with weakest links despite being a deep and talented club. But if there was any line or D pair to crater that's what would happen. We're not seeing that here under Tippett. Suddenly all the D pairs are floating, all the forward lines are rowing. When have you ever seen our bottomsix apply this much pressure in all zones and be a handful consistently?

Tippett transforms a lineup. He usually does.

 

[guymez]

I'm honestly a bit sad that no one else is missing the ring around the boards play to the stationary winger on the boards 10 ft inside our blue line. After watching that for 3 years straight, along with how every single team knew it was coming and would jump in front of the winger to steal...I kinda miss it.

I guess I could watch more Kings games.

This needs to be repeated over and over again.
The breakouts this season are night and day better than previous years. The play up the boards was and still is a TMac special and IMO it was excruciatingly painful to watch. Utilizing the middle of the ice and using more structure and short passing is a pleasure to watch.
Lets not stop there... the PK is much better so far this season. Now some of that may be personnel but you can see that the structure of the PK looks different. The players are positioned better to get their sticks in lanes and they are collapsing to the net.
I would even suggest that the defending in general is much much better than I have seen it in the past.

Its difficult to know why the team played so defensively irresponsibly the past few years...predictable system...poor execution of the system...I dont know.
I just know that I really like the changes I have seen so far.

Structure should be the word for this team IMO...thats made a huge difference in the early days of this season and I expect that to get better (more consistent) as the team becomes more automatic in their execution.

 

[Cloned]

Who designs breakouts on a teenager's face?

Breakout Designers, duh.

 

[Perfect_Drug]

When the Leafs proposed a Babcock for Hitchcock cock-swap.. little did we know we would get just the Tipp.

 

[oilynutz]

Found it!

18-19 Regular season prediction (And the result)

1. Nashville (8th)
2. Tampa Bay (1st)
3. Toronto (7th)
4. Columbus (13th)
5. Boston (3rd)
6. Winnipeg (10th)
7. Pittsburgh (9th)
8. San Jose (6th)
9. Anaheim ( 24th)
10. Philadelphia (22nd)
11. Florida (19th)
12. Washington (4th)
13. Vegas (16th)
14. Calgary (2nd)
15. Minnesota (21st)
16. Los Angeles (30th)
17. Carolina (11th)
18. St.Louis (12th)
19. Dallas (15th)
20. Chicago (20th)
21. Arizona (18th)
22. Buffalo (27th)
23. Colorado (17th)
24. Edmonton (25th)
25. New Jersey (29th)
26. Islanders (5th)
27. Montreal (14th)
28. Rangers (26th)
29. Vancouver (23rd)
30. Ottawa (31st)
31. Detroit (28th)

I don't know how familiar people here are how he does all his work. He isn't just guessing, he has a model which values every player and prediction comes from it.

I wonder how his system would value a guy coming over from Europe(Persson, Nygard, Haas) or a guy coming off a down year(Neal) or a change of coach. Guessing/models are pretty similar in how you place values on individual changes.

There are certain things analytics help with but it can't be used as blueprint for success.

 

[oobga]

I wonder how his system would value a guy coming over from Europe(Persson, Nygard, Haas) or a guy coming off a down year(Neal) or a change of coach. Guessing/models are pretty similar in how you place values on individual changes.

There are certain things analytics help with but it can't be used as blueprint for success.

I think he uses an NHL equivalent model for the unknowns. Most of our additions without much NHL history are just near 0 contributors. His model basically had our bottom 2 lines averaging out to 0 wins above replacement. Smith and Koskinen were both expected to be very mediocre to poor, which is fair based on recent history. Kassian was modeled as one of our most negative contributors at -0.5. Larsson 2nd with -0.3. Neal is 0.3, basically expecting him to play like last year. For reference McDavid is +4.7. Drai is +3.2.

TO be fair to anyone trying to predict this team, using recent history, it's hard not to come up with garbage results.

 

[Cloned]

^^Maroon was going to come in here and be successful no matter who the coach was as the situation was he would be getting some quality toi. Maroon in the stints that he had played with talent, was able to play well with that talent. Maroon was an add water and watch it bloom player.

Chiasson was somebody very interested in staying in the league and resurrecting his career.

There is little comparison to those outlier examples of players getting it done here vs what I happening now and ALL players being on board.

The revolving door list of players that didn't work under Hitchcock/McLellan is too long for me to list.

The difference between Tippett and McLellan is Tippett runs better schemes. He's a top hockey strategist. He's an excellent coach at getting players to play the right way and getting them to except and benefit from it. The trouble with a McLellan team is that it'll get the horses going but the supporting cast don't feel so much a part of things. In Tippett coaching is every players effort is integral, and they are all valuable pieces. Players (all) feel more included in a Tippett scheme.

He's better at getting players to buy in because of the results.

He's essentially the "action" part of Hitchcock saying "do what I tell you to do and we'll have success", whereas Hitch was mostly talk last year. Tippett walks the walk too.

Tippett is somewhat of a players coach like McLellan, but he does one thing that McLellan could never do - and that is make everybody feel like they have a role on the team. Players like him and he helps them get better stat lines resulting in better contracts for them.

 

[Bangers]

To me, the biggest difference between Tippett and McLellan is that Tippett has a history of changing his schemes to suit the roster, whereas McLellan played pretty much the exact system every year he's coached (even when it clearly isn't working).

 

[rboomercat90]

[QUOTE="rboomercat90, post: 165386793, member: 192487"Tippet is a much better coach than Mclellan. Historically, his teams overachieved while Mclellan’s underachieved. A big part of the reason why is because of him being able to get extra from his non star players, putting them into positions to use their strengths. Mclellan got nothing from those types, didn’t matter who they were because he didn’t see the need to try to look for or match strengths against other teams weaknesses. He believed in plug and play into his system and if it didn’t work he’d blame the player instead of the system. I.

Maroon and Kassian revived their careers here and blossomed into important players under TMac. Same with Chiasson to an extent last season. Even Mark Latestu had a 15 goal / 35 point season for us. So no, I don't really see it.

Am I happy that Dave Tippet is our head coach now? Yes absolutely! But there's no reason for revisionist history. Especially after 5 games![/QUOTE]
Those guys you mentioned played good hockey while playing with McDavid and or Draisatl and struggled when they weren’t. What we’re seeing with Tippett are players not playing with those two finding roles and helping to contribute. We never saw that with Mclellan. What we saw was a revolving door of bottom six players struggling. That’s why I said I don’t think it would be different for him with this group. I don’t see where I’m revising history.

 

[PaPaDee]

If Tippet is the best thing since sliced bread, why hasn’t he been employed for several years before the Oilers gave him a job? I need to see more before I anoint him some kind of great coach.

 

[Cloned]

If Tippet is the best thing since sliced bread, why hasn’t he been employed for several years before the Oilers gave him a job? I need to see more before I anoint him some kind of great coach.

He was employed, with Seattle.

 

[PaPaDee]

He was employed, with Seattle.

As a coach?

 

[Cloned]

As a coach?

No, but he wasn't exactly out of work or shunned out of the league like certain other ex-coaches who got fired.

 

[Panda Bear]

Found it!

18-19 Regular season prediction (And the result)

1. Nashville (8th)
2. Tampa Bay (1st)
3. Toronto (7th)
4. Columbus (13th)
5. Boston (3rd)
6. Winnipeg (10th)
7. Pittsburgh (9th)
8. San Jose (6th)
9. Anaheim ( 24th)
10. Philadelphia (22nd)
11. Florida (19th)
12. Washington (4th)
13. Vegas (16th)
14. Calgary (2nd)
15. Minnesota (21st)
16. Los Angeles (30th)
17. Carolina (11th)
18. St.Louis (12th)
19. Dallas (15th)
20. Chicago (20th)
21. Arizona (18th)
22. Buffalo (27th)
23. Colorado (17th)
24. Edmonton (25th)
25. New Jersey (29th)
26. Islanders (5th)
27. Montreal (14th)
28. Rangers (26th)
29. Vancouver (23rd)
30. Ottawa (31st)
31. Detroit (28th)

I don't know how familiar people here are how he does all his work. He isn't just guessing, he has a model which values every player and prediction comes from it.

Wait--we were supposed to be impressed by these predictions?

 

[Spawn]

Those guys you mentioned played good hockey while playing with McDavid and or Draisatl and struggled when they weren’t. What we’re seeing with Tippett are players not playing with those two finding roles and helping to contribute. We never saw that with Mclellan. What we saw was a revolving door of bottom six players struggling. That’s why I said I don’t think it would be different for him with this group. I don’t see where I’m revising history.

We have 1 goal from our bottom 6 through 5 games. We've seen 9 different players rotated into the bottom 6 in those 5 games and they are collectively a -11.

We're winning games because Draisaitl and McDavid are scoring at ~190 point paces.

 

[backhandsauce]

Don’t know where to put this but Talbot just let his first shot on goal go in lol.

 

[Panda Bear]

Tippett chose to leave the Coyotes in 2017 because he no longer saw himself as a fit with the organization.

If he had wanted to coach in 17-18 or 18-19, he would have.

 

[Cloned]

Don’t know where to put this but Talbot just let his first shot on goal go in lol.

We're all in the OOT thread.