My theory on the horrid Start we saw this year:
This team has always needed a long run way to hit their peak. This is who the Oilers showed they are for how many years now. This year the Goal was to flip that script and start out hot out of the gates. This is why Connor called for the early Captain's Skates.
I don't think the Oilers came out flat effort wise to start the season, effort had nothing to do with it, I believe in the character in the room and I think they've earned that reputation. Those games against the Nucks they were trying, the effort was there to bring their A game early that usually would take a good 3-5 months for the entire team to eventually evolve into. They tried to bring it early and failed to execute, as nothing was clicking, and mistakes were piling up. The team hadn't learned to Peak out of the gates or maybe they set their expectations too high and that was never in the cards. That then snowballed into a lack of confidence through out the line up and it got worse from there.
We also know what this team was under Woody. And that was still an elite team, but an elite team that didn't put enough importance and emphasis on minimizing mistakes and being responsible defensively. These are the teams we watched in the playoffs get burned for 9 goals against talentless hacks like the Flames. The defensive mindset was not there. So I think this lack of defensive mindset was still here in spades during the beginning of the season but amplified cause we were trying to be a team that we weren't ready to be (the long runway argument).
This theory is also why I think under Knob/Coffey we will be a better team than we've ever seen before in the McD era. The team will still find its find its execution and offence to be able to run teams out of the building with pure offence, but that probably was coming back if Woody stayed anyways. So now with Knob/Coffey we are adding that defensive mindset on top of the high effort, high offence teams that Woody helped build. Thus why we are seeing this type of dominance now in our games. We got everything Woody built but added so much needed defensive mindset from Knob/Coffey.