He came here thinking he was the smartest coach in the history of coaching, buoyed by the Toronto Media and their non stop fluffery of anything Toronto. His first order of business was to alter the dressing room by taking down photos of Oiler greats and inscribe forgettable slogans about carrying water and chopping wood. His second order of business was to remove the donuts in the media room and replace them with carrot sticks, which made Terry Jones go into convulsions. Eakins came to the Oilers with his unique defensive system he liked to entitle "The Swarm", which was going to revolutionize the game and turn the Oilers from perennial losers to perennial winners. The result?
It didn't go over very well. But Eakins was not a man who would wilt at the first signs of trouble. Instead he blamed the Oilers players for being poor at understanding basic defensive concepts. Looking at The Swarm, one could argue that a 3 inch puck can travel through 4 skaters legs with relative ease to the open man out front, but Dallas Eakins was not one to be discouraged. The best way to get his point across he decided, was to sit in the bleachers with the reporters at practice letting his assistants run the drills, so Eakins could lecture reporters on how the game should be played and letting them know how many miles he could ride his bike and how many push ups he could do.
No, Dallas kept on keeping on, spending inordinate amounts of time at the white board at practice trying to hammer home how to play the game the Dallas Eakins way. Shooting from everywhere including from far outside the zone where goals are typically scored in order to win the Corsi battle, no physical play whatsoever, no retaliation, no hitting, and how to play with 5 forwards on the power play. He could have used the video room or dressing room whiteboard, but instead used half the practice time preaching, stopping drills which ran at a snails pace to educate the Oiler players on where to be when this or that happened, as if the game were a stop and start video game. However the losses kept mounting. So Dallas tried new tactics in game.
He first tried the Bunny Hop (some may call it the Kangaroo Hop, but that is a thread for another day) in Winnipeg. He thought he could distract the other teams players by pretending to be farm animals but NHL players just did not have his level of complex thought processing and did not understand what he was trying to do other than make himself look like a complete jackass on the bench. So instead he started playing RNH 3o minutes a night. When RNH went down with the inevitable injury, he decided to play Taylor Hall at center saying that its just hockey, and anyone can play centre, in the NHL. Again, Dallas failed.
The losses kept mounting, and despite his 3 hour post game press conferences trying to explain why the Oilers lost despite his superior coaching skills and repeatedly tossing Oiler players under the bus when not commenting about their eyes, he lectured the media about his philosophies on winning, fitness and even life itself. With the pressure mounting to get wins however, Dallas Eakins had an epiphany. It wasn't about wins and losses. It was about staying dry under pressure and embarrassing your best player.
When accidentally sprayed with water by an exploding water bottle Hall threw on the ground during (yet another) embarrassing loss to Calgary, the rubber finally met the road with Eakins. He had a kindergarten style hissy fit worthy of the most petulant 5 year old and let Hall have it in front of his teammates and on national television. That was the line Eakins was not going to cross. Getting his hair mussed and his suit jacket wet was too much for a coach of his calibre to take. No more.
The Oilers were going to see the real Dallas Eakins from now on. Take no prisoners, eye of the tiger, super swarm Dallas Eakins was going to rule with an iron fist in the locker room and on the bench, hair hanging in his face and all. It was Game On. He was going to will the Oilers to winning by chopping more water and carrying more wood than anyone in history of coaching.
But he failed again and again and again. He was not Thomas the Train Engine who thought he could. He was Dallas Eakins the Head Coach who thought he was smarter than the rest of the league. Exasperated at losing, he was mercifully fired after the worst Oiler start in team history.
At his final press conference he was defiant in the fact that Craig was On It, whatever that meant. He left town a beaten man.
However he has risen from the ashes of ineptitude and is now coaching our hated rivals in Anaheim.
So please Oilers, for the Love of God and All Things Holy, beat that mother f***er and his Ducks like a rented mule for us fans who had to endure that idiot for 2 and a half years of the worst coaching in Oiler history.
