To be fair, a lot of people on HFBoards crow about shots and “high danger chances”, but our defence has guys like Stecher, Klingberg, Bouchard, even Josh Brown and Ty Emberson are not great netfront defenders. The difference between a “HDSC” shooting from the hash marks into traffic at a set goalie, or a HDSC tapping a puck into an empty net is not recorded.
A five-alarm fire where Defencemen are either not in their position at all, or are doing something completely unexpected/ineffective, is actually much worse than a breakaway against. If the goalie is expecting that a certain offensive player is covered or mitigated, or that a part of the ice is safe… they are going to cheat to other areas (pass/shot/whatever as the circumstance may dictate). A solid NHL team should be able to limit these types of chances to 1 or 2 a game, maybe less. It’s not impossible. Defenders like Ekholm are capable of allowing 0 chances of this type per game.
The other Oilers defenders are massive perpetrators of five-alarm fire/abdication of duty… when things go bad, they go very bad. Shooters who are completely unmolested in a busy zone full of players, etc … Pointing out Stecher at the netfront is something abundantly obvious to anyone with hockey knowledge. He can’t do the job. You can blame coaching a bit for allowing these situations to occur, but mostly it’s a lack of competent personnel. Overall the coaching has done yeomans work to limiting these horrible miscues of which the Oilers were massively guilty for the past decade, but the personnel has not improved in this area of the game. The coaching may be as good as it’s been in the McDavid era, but the right side is as bad as it’s been in the McDavid era from a defensive perspective. A player like Bouchard is always going to have turnovers, sometimes in the defensive zone, and everyone else has to be ready to accommodate. But if you’re forced to use him on the PK and in defensive zone faceoffs, you’re not in an ideal situation.