People will be all outraged by my 'unproveable' speculation but I feel Eakins is Charley McCarthy to MacT's Edgar Bergen. MacT fell in love with this guy over a short period of time and sees Eakins as his mini me. I would bet that one reason he loves the guy is that Eakins asks for macT's opinion on just about everything.
The coach and management group have shown they have just as much trouble dealing with depth on the team as having none.
It seems the stratagem for this season was to in essence treat the 1st 1/4 of the season as an extended ex season because they can't figure out who they want on the team.
Three games in an already too many major fails:
- Ridiculously sending Marincin to the minors.
- Keeping Nurse and Klefbom up and sitting them in the press box then feeling obligated to make room for Nurse and play him.
- One goalie looks good in the ex season and ready to play, the other doesn't so obvioulsy you start the guy struggling game one.
- As usual doing their very best to diminish a player resource by benching Petry. Like Gagner they had a chance to move him previous to this and they looked like they had no long range plan for him, now lets lower his value as much as possible.
- The defensive version of toby Peterson, Reddox, Marty Sakic in Hunt a 'gem' discovered by mact.
- The totally ill fated decsion of picking a captain that very quickly becomes lower roster and now you can't sit him.
- Can't swallow pride and press box the guys that should be press boxed (nikitin) because he is one of mact's boys.
- Idiotic ignoring of the biggest weakness on the team (center) and faulty theory spouted by many that we can 'shelter or protect' guys like Draisitl. Road match ups mean he either plays 10 mins a game or gets killed by big vet centers.
People calling to Eakins to be canned have to realize that if he goes MacT goes behind the bench and nothing will change, he proved in his previous tenure he has no clue how to get the best out of players that do not nicely fit into his idea of what an nhler will be like.
The one big cliche that gets tossed around so often but 100% applies to this team is that 'They are in denial.' They can't fathom that despite checking off all the boxes that good teams check off that the team is this bad. They can't figure out that it's more important who is in these postions rather than just the existence of these positions.
Nailed it
the Oilers brass have convinced themselves that this is a decent team
-they've convinced themselves that Draisaitl is NHL-ready...despite the fact he only got 1 assist in pre-season
-they've convinced themselves that the center depth is good enough...there's a reason MacT refused to sign or trade for another center, having a 21 year old weak center and an 18 year old rookie is "good enough" in the top 6....inexcusable
-they've already traded Jeff Petry, a good d-man they've developed for the past 7 seasons...it's just a matter of which team gets the fruits of our labour...we're probably gonna get picks and a depth forward for him at best
-they've convinced themselves that Klefbom is better than Marincin, despite play and stats saying otherwise
frankly, looks good on management to get burned for baffling decisions