Man im as big an Oilers fan as anyone but even I will admit this team is all McDavid. Teams like Pittsburgh, Toronto, Washington, Tampa can live without Crosby or Malkin, Matthews or Tavares, Backstrom or Kuznetsov, Stamkos or Point. Could you imagine the Oilers without McDavid? They are disaster some nights with him I cant even a=imagine this team if he goes down and we have Draisaitl/Strome as our 1-2 punch down the middle.
and I guarantee Connor wins a cup in Edmonton. I guarantee it .
How do you guarantee it when you don't even know what the roster is like in 3 years? They don't even have a legit core.
The Leafs have a far better roster thats extremely young and on top of that have a much better prospect pool. Even if their defence isn't the best , they have a #1dman in Rielly. The Oilers don't have that. Just a couple guys who can compliment a #1 . They also don't have any overpaid players. You can say Tavares but he's a bonifide elite player. Its different than overpaying Lucic, Russell, Sekera and even Draisaitl to a degree.
Again, we would be a disaster without McDavid.
I didn't say it would be this year. But there's more than enough young talent there around him and coming up to win it in the near future .
Unless they can get rid of Lucic and Draisaitl turns into an elite player as well as us picking up a #1 man somehow I highly doubt that. We have 3 legit top 6 forwards. Puljujarvi looks lost and Yamamoto is the only "young talent" other than McDavid that looks like a surefire NHL player. Bouchard, Bear and Jones are nice dmen but none are sure bets to be top 4 guys and I highly doubt any become top pairing dmen except Bouchard but as a guy who lives in London and watches them a lot I think Bouchard becomes a real good #3 at best. Im an Oilers fan but I have no clue how you can believe any of the stuff you're saying right now.
1) Tampa missed the playoffs 2 years ago with Stamkos out, so there goes that theory. Pittsburgh is a bad example. No team has 2 players like they do. Not even close. But even then, how much did they accomplish during the years that Sid was down? There are no banners for 1st/2nd round exits. Every team needs their superstar players to win. Edmonton is no exception
2) McDavid, Draisaitl, RNH, Yamamoto, Klef, Nurse, Larsson, Bouchard is abasolutely a young legit core. Nice try though.
3) We can't call Tavares a bit overpaid, but we can call Draisaitl a bit overpaid? Both are overpaid by a million. Bad example. Toronto does have a bad contract right now in Marleau, lets see how they do with the others, if they can manage to get contracts done at all...
4) Draisaitl isn't an elite player? The guy just turned 23. He's a beast on the draw, solid 2 ways, just put up 2 70+ pt seasons and currently has 7g and 13pts in 11 games. How much more do you want.
I'm sorry, but this was just a terrible effort to make the Oilers look bad. And you use Toronto as an example, who look pretty good in the regular season so far, but still haven't made it as deep in the playoffs as this young Oilers core. Find a better example. And to any Leaf fans who read this, I'm sorry, I had no intention of making this about you or your team. As always, it was brought up for no good reason