Pre-Game Talk: BLEH!

[Arpeggio]

Their 8 wingers dressed tonight have a combined 4 goals.
McLeod, Holloway and Foegele have 4 goals each. Rough

People complaining about the defense this season are really not paying attention to the real issues. Team can't score for shit, the starting goaltender has had like 2 good starts. Those have been the main issues. Long term the defense is likely the biggest issue that needs to be addressed but this season, it's been far down the list of problems.

YUP. Not to mention our generational talents scoring at a relatively pedestrian pace. Team will start winning when the forwards who are paid to score actually score.

I think they'll figure it out, shooting % will go up and the team will be fine. This team isn't going anywhere if Arvidsson, Skinner, Hyman, and Nuge aren't scoring at a high clip. The whole point of letting those guys go was to make room for offensive players with a better track record. If that gamble doesn't pay off, they're hooped.

 

[TopShelfGloveSide]

Losing them is fine, if their replacements are better.

So far, they're not.

Also, there was another defenseman we lost in the offseason.

You missed the boat.

 

[Morpheus]

Make gdt?

Done
GDT is up.

 

[K1984]

One thing to consider in comparing our Defence to last year….we’re tending to compare a “raw version” of this season to a matured / playoff version from last season. Recall that Knoblauch is s still fiddling with D pairings, D positioning and PK assignments. Apart from Ekholm and Bouchard, it’s been a blender process. Even flipping Dmen to play on their offsides at times is a head scratcher, unless it’s part of a bigger experiment he has in mind.
Personally, I can’t wait for it to settle down….develop their chemistry and communications….then find their rightful TOI allotments.

It's like everything else with this f***ing team every October - it's at least half a step off. If we want to look apples to apples, our defence was demonstrably worse at this exact same time last year than it is today.

Assuming that a 5/10 is performing at a bare average level of what is expected from each discipline, this is kind of where I see the performance in key areas:

Forwards - 0/10
Defence - 4/10
Goaltending - 1/10
Powerplay - 0/10
Penalty Kill - 0/10

I don't think the D has been great, but the expectations weren't high either. They've at least been up to a sniff below the below average expectations we had for them to begin with IMO. The rest though? Complete failures.

This team is built for its strengths to cover its weaknesses. The team's strength's haven't presented themselves for a minute.

 

[The Panther]

Some of you seem weirdly unaware of the link between defence and quality goaltending.

Goaltenders looking good at the NHL level is 90% about team defence. Look no further than Vasilevskiy, who for years looked like the top goalie around, but once Tampa lost its way defensively the past couple of years, he suddenly looks like Stu Skinner.

Pretty much all the goals against Skinner in the Columbus game were the result of horrible defensive coverage in the D-zone (something Ceci and Desharnais were generally pretty good at). Look at the 4th goal by Duchene. That's sub-AHL level defense by Emberson. Stecher is okay, but very limited in skill (kind of a smaller Desharnais). Nurse has the worst hockey IQ of any D in the NHL, but we all know that.

However, the limited ablity of the bottom-two pairings has actually done relatively well thus far. And it's true that the D-core hasn't been the main issue with the team SO FAR, but my point is that even if the offense gets going (which it must, as some point), the current defense is taking the team nowhere.

I really do not understand why the org decided to sign two wingers of similar skillset (J. Skinner and Arvidsson). I can see signing one of them (Skinner was cheap; Arvidsson a much-needed right shot), but signing two and then letting the defense-core go to rot was just crazy.

Oilers are down three serviceable NHL Dmen from last season, and haven't replaced them yet. God help us if Ekholm gets injured.