A good read here about coaching and systems (paging
@Cloned 
What Kris Knoblauch can, and can't, do to turn around the Oilers' season
You don’t hear the term “structure” as much in other sports. Hockey is such a quick-twitch instant-reaction sport that you often don’t have time to look up and make a thoughtful play, so the best thing the team can provide for you is:
in this type of scenario,
here is where my teammates should roughly be. That allows you to blindly bang the puck off the boards to where a teammate is supposed to be, or flip it up the middle, depending on the situation.
Breaking: the Oilers weren’t using anything revolutionary under Jay Woodcroft, they were using the same zone defence most of the league does. (If you ever doubt the lack of variety in the NHL’s systems play, consider the PP breakout where a system choice is plainly visible to the public, and
every team in the league uses the same drop breakout.)
Maybe zone isn’t the right choice for the Oilers, fine. Maybe they’d be better off thinking less and skating more in man-on-man “structure.” Maybe. But that’s not what ails the Oil, certainly not when they were 3-9-1 and made the decision to fire Woodcroft.
Even if it was, it’s not like bringing in a new coach to fix these system “problems” is as simple as toggling game plans like in a video game. Because hockey, as I said, is so quick-twitch and instant-reaction that you want the way you’re playing to be so engrained in your players that they just react without thinking. You hear coaches say it all the time about a new player adapting to their new team: “He’s thinking right now, we want to get him to where he’s just playing.”
---- This is overwhelmingly on the players to reduce their bad habit, poor decisions and erratic discipline. Always has been and its a chronic, systemic issue that has repeated coach after coach after coach with this team's on-ice personnel. ----
