StevenToddIves
Registered User
They also just didnt do a good job scouting in any of their top end draft years. pool party and nail were complete misses. They are also just a complete disaster of an organization.
That's the key, and you could not be more correct.
The problem with Edmonton was not that Nail Yakupov was a bust. The problem was that they only had one(!!!) pick after the first round make any discernible impact over an almost decade-long span (Jeff Petry). That is AWFUL scouting.
Why? Well, their front office is basically a boys-club of ex-Oilers stars who come to work in t-shirts and have no fear of losing their jobs. Kevin Lowe is a moron. Craig MacTavish is a moron. Dallas Eakins was (and still is) a moron. Their scouting staff was almost entirely comprised of ex-teammates (not trained scouts) who would prefer to draft a big, strong Canadian kid to an actually talented hockey player. They have proven painfully ill-equipped at a management or coaching level.
When a barrage of media criticism finally put their jobs at risk, they hired the most like-minded ex-GM available in Peter Chiarelli, a guy who traded Blake Wheeler for not using his size to drop the gloves, and then Phil Kessel and Tyler Seguin for not mucking enough in the corners. What happened was predictable, in that he traded Tyler Hall and then systematically flushed the Oilers future down the toilet. How he was allowed to sign a mediocre back-up goalie to a multi-year, $4.5 million contract mere days before his firing is a perfect example of just how sorry the Oilers front office truly is. Did Kevin Lowe green-light this awful deal because he was still fighting for Chiarelli's job? Or did he actually not consider firing Chiarelli until two days before he actually did? It's just putrid management.
Also, we cannot complete this diatribe without mentioning perhaps the worst trade in NHL history, the Griffin Reinhart deal. Although Mike Milbury made several bad deals, all the players he received in those trades were, at the time, considered very good NHL players. Chiarelli gave the Isles two early picks (who became Barzal and Beauvillier) for a player whom, if you asked 29 other NHL GMs at the time, had maybe an outside chance of becoming a third-pairing defensive D despite his extremely poor skating. Why did Chiarelli make the deal, then? Because Reinhart was big, Canadian, and won a Memorial Cup with the Edmonton Oil Kings. This trade literally changed the course of the Oilers future more than anything else.