It’s so unfair to Lavoie. He was trending well in Bako, and now his career and chances at the NHL are cratering.
Sucks for Lavoie because he had worked his way into being a call up option for us. Vegas steps in and basically sewered his future.
If I'm Bowman, I'm looking if I can buy low on Sissons. Having a down year but could be retained down to $1.43m for the next two seasons. Would be a very small impact on this year's cap. Tons of flexibility, plus PKer, great on the draw and has shown well in the postseason.
Vegas should do the right thing and trade him back to the Oilers for futures but they won’t. Not that I think he’s an option for the Oilers but he’d help Bako.
Unfortunately I do think the ship has sailed on his NHL dreams. I do agree he’d help Bako.
Way too early to judge him, he shouldn't be going anywhere. Our talent pool has been drained too much as it is.
I wouldn't worry much about getting younger for that role. Considering we've got a number of guys in the system in O'Reilly, Philp and Savoie, I'd prefer a player who is a match for the Ryan role and capable of being a mentor to some of the younger guys.
He's a 3 million dollar center on pace for less than 25 points while being much weaker defensively than the guy he was supposed to be an "upgrade" on in McLeod, both in terms of even strength and in terms of penalty killing. He's putting up awful possession metrics on arguably the best possession team in the NHL, behind even Jeff Skinner. You can't even call him unlucky because he's actually leading all our full time forwards in PDO. He looks slow and ineffective and the team is often hemmed in our own zone with him on the ice. If you covered up the nameplate and replaced it with one of the whipping boys like McLeod/Foegele/Puljujarvi/Holloway etc he'd probably be the most hated player on the team, but he gets away with his awful gameplay because of his name value.
Was going to ask the same thing, but don't think we need Sissons either.
He started slow and has picked it up. McLeod started hot and has been garbage lately. Pace has to be the dumbest thing out there.
Shutdown line players often have excellent fancies lol, what are you talking about? And even if you want to ignore analytics, Henrique's actual production itself is awful too. Our penalty kill is also much worse in part because of replacing McLeod with him (yes I'm aware that losing Desharnais and Skinner's terrible start are bigger reasons).
And McLeod's transition play is so much better that he puts up better defensive numbers than Henrique anyway. What's the point of having better in-zone defense if the puck stays in your zone for significantly longer and the opponent gets more time to generate scoring chances?
McLeod is an infinitely better skater, henrique is a smarter and more experienced player. They offer different things
Never disagreed with that. But the results show that McLeod put up significantly better defensive numbers with the 2023-24 Oilers than Henrique did on the 2024-25 Oilers despite this current team actually having better defensive structure and support, and the eye test would suggest this too with how often McLeod was the guy carrying the puck out for us. It's possible that Henrique plays better as the year progresses, but until he does we've gotten ourselves a downgrade at 3C.
