B/c there has been plenty of young Oilers whose skating improved. Evan Bouchard is the latest example. He's still no Cale Makar but he went from a dude who was considered a weak skater even at the junior level to a guy whose probably only slightly below league average as a skater at this point and will likely get to average by his prime. Doesn't mean Pelletier was necessarily the reason for these players' improved skating but something is working. Meanwhile every goalie on this team has regressed without fail compared to other org and often improved after leaving us except Mike Smith who enlisted his own personal goalie.
Wasn't actually taking a shot at Pelletier. I like him a lot. Was just trying to make a point that when evaluating a specialized coach like Schwartz and Pelletier you need to look more at the process than the results. The Results are so often impacted by external factors that these coaches have no control over.
Any goalies performance is strongly impacted by the team in front of them. Edmonton's team defense has had very few bright spots over Schwartz's tenure. Id bet that if you cross referenced years that they had good team defense you will also find good goalie performances in those years. Poor defense doesn't only increase the quality of chances against, it also has a negative impact on a goalies confidence in the team in front of them. When you don't trust the team in front of you you tend to try to do things to make up for their shortcomings, which doesn't help.
Another thing that Schwartz can't control is the GM. How many promising goalie prospects has the GM brought to our team? Very few.
As for Smith using a different offseason goalie coach. This is very common. Most goalies train with a local coach during the offseason. Not a lot of goalies make Edmonton their summer home. The ones that do spend the summer in Edmonton and with Schwartz though are having a lot of success, Hart, Jarry, Skinner to name a few that have frequently trained with Schwartz over the summers.
I'm not saying that Schwartz is the best goalie coach in the league, I'm just saying that I don't think its fair to look at the results and pin them all on Schwartz. I like what I see when I watch Schwartz coach, I spend a lot of time in rinks and I see him coaching quite a bit and I think that he is very good at what he does. I would wager that the powers to be within the Oilers see the same thing that I do. Hence why he has been kept around by so many coaches and GM's.
