Todd Nelson report card

[Ducksforcup]

In the games I've watched, they seem to have been playing harder and better.

I'd say it is a marked improvement.

 

[The Nuge]

Is the general consensus among Oilers fans that they'd be okay with him coming back another year? Just as a peripheral watcher, the teams seems to be playing noticeably better since he took over. I mean, let's be realistic. Babcock is NOT going to Edmonton next season.

Unless we can get a Babcock or Tippett, absolutely. No sense in bringing in another rookie, and risking getting an Eakins

 

[Arpeggio]

I think right now its in the air. While he is coaching well and players are progressing under him, he is still untested. the Oilers need vet presence in a bad way. Although he has a good chink of games remaining to be judged on. Byslma might be available but if Nelson has chemistry with the players by seasons end, id keep him. Might like Cooper in Tampa. Started out in the AHL, did very well with Tampas farm team and then become the NHL coach for all those guys. You are right about Babcock but sometimes $$$ talks



Its very real and has been proven multiple times. There is extreme rare cases of teams or players being able to consistently shoot above the mean, or have team sv % above the mean for multiple seasons. I don't think Eakins was a horrendous as his record indicated, but he was very poor with player development and handling, and that was the biggest issue

The Oilers never had guys in front, and they shot from everywhere under Eakins. That's why their Corsi and PDO numbers were so favourable to Eakins. In my opinion.

 

[MikeModano9]

Unless we can get a Babcock or Tippett, absolutely. No sense in bringing in another rookie, and risking getting an Eakins

I'd rather keep Nelson then continue this side show of getting a new coach every half year. Even if it is Tippett or Babcock.

 

[The Nuge]

The Oilers never had guys in front, and they shot from everywhere under Eakins. That's why their Corsi and PDO numbers were so favourable to Eakins. In my opinion.

Agreed. Not to mention the other team's chances were wide open in the slot. The quality of chances made all the difference

 

[Ogopogo*]

I think right now its in the air. While he is coaching well and players are progressing under him, he is still untested. the Oilers need vet presence in a bad way. Although he has a good chink of games remaining to be judged on. Byslma might be available but if Nelson has chemistry with the players by seasons end, id keep him. Might like Cooper in Tampa. Started out in the AHL, did very well with Tampas farm team and then become the NHL coach for all those guys. You are right about Babcock but sometimes $$$ talks



Its very real and has been proven multiple times. There is extreme rare cases of teams or players being able to consistently shoot above the mean, or have team sv % above the mean for multiple seasons. I don't think Eakins was a horrendous as his record indicated, but he was very poor with player development and handling, and that was the biggest issue

You really believe that a team with Stamkos, Kucherov and Johnson should have the same shooting % as a team like the Buffalo Sabres? You really believe a team with Lundqvist should have the same save % as the Edmonton Oilers? It is all luck? Really?

That is just plain stupidity.

 

[Aceboogie]

You really believe that a team with Stamkos, Kucherov and Johnson should have the same shooting % as a team like the Buffalo Sabres? You really believe a team with Lundqvist should have the same save % as the Edmonton Oilers? It is all luck? Really?

That is just plain stupidity.

Like I said, rare exceptions. Stamkos is an exception, Crosby is an exception, Rask and the Bruins are an exception.

All I am saying is that Nelsons numbers are still not playoff caliber, and his PDO is fairly high. Expect a decline in PDO and thus goals and possibly wins.

This is like when Toronto (just an example) was winning 10 straight with a sky high PDO earlier this season.

I like Nelson, but he has to prove more to me (but he is doing a good job so far)

 

[Arpeggio]

Agreed. Not to mention the other team's chances were wide open in the slot. The quality of chances made all the difference

Exactly. This is why the most important "advanced" stats involve player tracking and shot charting. Corsi is just a different way of counting shots, it's not a wonder-stat.

Under Nelson the team is playing an NHL style of game. They're still a bad team, but they will be much more successful under Nelson's system than under Eakins'.

 

[Ogopogo*]

Like I said, rare exceptions. Stamkos is an exception, Crosby is an exception, Rask and the Bruins are an exception.

All I am saying is that Nelsons numbers are still not playoff caliber, and his PDO is fairly high. Expect a decline in PDO and thus goals and possibly wins.

This is like when Toronto (just an example) was winning 10 straight with a sky high PDO earlier this season.

I like Nelson, but he has to prove more to me (but he is doing a good job so far)

Good teams and coaches can create better scoring chances than others. Bad teams and coaches give up far better chances than others. PDO is not luck at all, it is a culmination of good or bad play.

 

[tony d]

B for me, he's done a good job thus far.

 

[THall4]

Couple things i see completely different from when Eakins was coach and with Nelson as coach.

1. Overall play. Oilers are (for the most part) in games..with Eakins..this team folded like a childrens book if something happened like a soft GA.

2. The players. Nelson understands his players strengths and weaknesses. Players like Lander and Schultz are playing alot better under Nelson becuase hes putting them in a position to succeed rather then fail. Eakins had Schultz playing 24 min against oppositions best with a #5-6 dman (Ference) whereas Nelson has him playing with a young very smart stud (Klefbom) and softer minutes (still 20+ min) which they are earning while Petry and Fayne are facing the tougher comp.

3. Yakupov is actually being rewarded for good play. Under Eakins at times this guy would be the only player going..but would be the first to be benched when **** hit the fan.

4. Lineup continuity. Lines remain intact (pending injury) so players can actually get some chemistry together..under Eakins the lineup would change just because he was bored or something.

These are all IMO ...not speaking for all Oiler fans on HF.

 

[THall4]

Like I said, rare exceptions. Stamkos is an exception, Crosby is an exception, Rask and the Bruins are an exception.

All I am saying is that Nelsons numbers are still not playoff caliber, and his PDO is fairly high. Expect a decline in PDO and thus goals and possibly wins.

This is like when Toronto (just an example) was winning 10 straight with a sky high PDO earlier this season.

I like Nelson, but he has to prove more to me (but he is doing a good job so far)

The team he coaches isnt playoff caliber...why would the numbers be?

Nelson still has alot more to prove...but what hes proven already is that hes a far superior coach to Eakins.

I would mind the Oilers brining in a more experienced coach and have Nelson be the associate coach to garner more experience.

 

[I am the Liquor]

Like I said, rare exceptions. Stamkos is an exception, Crosby is an exception, Rask and the Bruins are an exception.

All I am saying is that Nelsons numbers are still not playoff caliber, and his PDO is fairly high. Expect a decline in PDO and thus goals and possibly wins.

This is like when Toronto (just an example) was winning 10 straight with a sky high PDO earlier this season.

I like Nelson, but he has to prove more to me (but he is doing a good job so far)

The Oiler dynasty teams had a high PDO. Guess they were just lucky all those years.

 

[Aceboogie]

The Oiler dynasty teams had a high PDO. Guess they were just lucky all those years.

Elite teams with elite players can sustain high PDOs as they are just good at shooting or have elite goaltenders. The 2015 Oilers, are nowhere near elite. The PDO will come back down and they will go just below .500 the rest of the way out.

Do people not remember Buffalos random winning streak this season, and Torontos, both fueled by high PDO. Surprising they haven't kept it up, because PDO is in no way luck and can be directly influenced by players and coaches

 

[Beerfish]

Win or lose the team for the most part has looked much better. They still come up with clunkers but they actually look like they know what they want to accomplish out there.

Tough to evaluate when you are going up against the sheer and utter disaster Eakins/MacT were.

I don't see him as a long term answer, not because he is not a potentially good coach but because we have an interfering busy body of a former coach as the GM who will stick his nose and opinions into everything coach related.

 

[CantHaveTkachev]

Elite teams with elite players can sustain high PDOs as they are just good at shooting or have elite goaltenders. The 2015 Oilers, are nowhere near elite. The PDO will come back down and they will go just below .500 the rest of the way out.

Do people not remember Buffalos random winning streak this season, and Torontos, both fueled by high PDO. Surprising they haven't kept it up, because PDO is in no way luck and can be directly influenced by players and coaches

while I think there's some merit in PDO...I think it has nothing to do with "luck" and everything to do with coaching

the Oilers, under Eakins, aren't "unlucky"...they were coached horribly...
-gave up too many point-blank chances and odd-man rushes, which led to low save percentages by Fasth/Scrivens
-shot from everywhere and rarely got greasy goals...which leads to low shooting percentage
that combination leads to a bad PDO

 

[The Big Unit]

Visually the Oilers are better!

 

[missinthejets]

Elite teams with elite players can sustain high PDOs as they are just good at shooting or have elite goaltenders. The 2015 Oilers, are nowhere near elite. The PDO will come back down and they will go just below .500 the rest of the way out.

Do people not remember Buffalos random winning streak this season, and Torontos, both fueled by high PDO. Surprising they haven't kept it up, because PDO is in no way luck and can be directly influenced by players and coaches

Ok but what about the fact that the Oilers had a pretty high PDO under Kreuger, a terrible one under Eakins and now a better one under Nelson... does that not scream that something Eakins was doing was affecting those numbers?

It's not luck. Eakins team was bad and led to a low save % and a poor shooting %. It's not all random luck, how a team is playing and how they're trying to generate offence and defend can impact it. Not all shots are equal and that is why those stats are not the gospel. Yes in the long run the average matters, but that requires the assumption that a team has a decent coach to start with.

 

[oilers_guy_eddie]

Unless we can get a Babcock or Tippett, absolutely. No sense in bringing in another rookie, and risking getting an Eakins

This is how I feel. Now that we've got rid of the worst coach in franchise history, let's just have some stability and continuity. Nelson did a good job with the OKC Barons, he did a good job with Klefbom and Lander, and the early returns look pretty good on turning around Jeff Schultz as well. He seems like a good choise to try and salvage guys like Schultz and Yakupov. Let him keep working with the kids. Maybe in the future when we have a better roster we can revisit it and say "you know, maybe Todd Nelson isn't the coach to get to the next level", but for right now I feel comfortable that he's a good choice to work with the players we have.


I think these next 3 posts are pretty bang-on when it comes to why Dallas Eakins' moronic systems might have been right for winning the Advanced Statz battle while being completely wrong for winning NHL games:

The Oilers never had guys in front, and they shot from everywhere under Eakins. That's why their Corsi and PDO numbers were so favourable to Eakins. In my opinion.

Agreed. Not to mention the other team's chances were wide open in the slot. The quality of chances made all the difference

while I think there's some merit in PDO...I think it has nothing to do with "luck" and everything to do with coaching

the Oilers, under Eakins, aren't "unlucky"...they were coached horribly...
-gave up too many point-blank chances and odd-man rushes, which led to low save percentages by Fasth/Scrivens
-shot from everywhere and rarely got greasy goals...which leads to low shooting percentage
that combination leads to a bad PDO

 

[oobga]

while I think there's some merit in PDO...I think it has nothing to do with "luck" and everything to do with coaching

the Oilers, under Eakins, aren't "unlucky"...they were coached horribly...
-gave up too many point-blank chances and odd-man rushes, which led to low save percentages by Fasth/Scrivens
-shot from everywhere and rarely got greasy goals...which leads to low shooting percentage
that combination leads to a bad PDO

Agree with this. Eakins basically designed his system in a way that would result in terrible PDO. It wasn't intentional of course, his main goal was just to increase corsi for and decrease it against, but he did it by cranking up the quality of chances against and decreasing them for. Takes less shots to score on us (because high risk coverage to try to get the puck back ASAP makes the average shot attempt against higher quality than normal), and takes more shots for us to ever score (because we keep shooting from far away to ensure a high corsi rate per amount of zone time). Terrible system made by a terrible coach, but hey, at least he got that corsi % up.

It's likely unprecedented for an NHL coach to ever coach just for corsi's like Eakins pretty much admitted to doing, so it's hard to really compare Eakins to anyone else. Pretty sure every other coach is concerned with generating and preventing high quality scoring chances. Such a shame this all had to happen with the Oilers after all the crap we've had to watch these last 9 years.

Nelson is just trying to coach like a normal coach would. Figure out the strength of your players and put them in situations to succeed. Get them to work hard in practice and during games. Get players to go to the dirty areas to try to score. Try to minimize high quality chances against by stopping cross-ice passes and shots from the slot. Don't be an egotistical arse and make basically everyone dislike you.

Eakins on the other hand? He was trying to make a name for himself as an innovator. He wanted to revolutionize hockey and failed miserably. His system and the ways he thought everyone should aspire be were more important than any of his players and he kept pushing all of it until it finally got him fired.

 

[Ogopogo*]

Agree with this. Eakins basically designed his system in a way that would result in terrible PDO. It wasn't intentional of course, his main goal was just to increase corsi for and decrease it against, but he did it by cranking up the quality of chances against and decreasing them for. Takes less shots to score on us (because high risk coverage to try to get the puck back ASAP makes the average shot attempt against higher quality than normal), and takes more shots for us to ever score (because we keep shooting from far away to ensure a high corsi rate per amount of zone time). Terrible system made by a terrible coach, but hey, at least he got that corsi % up.

It's likely unprecedented for an NHL coach to ever coach just for corsi's like Eakins pretty much admitted to doing, so it's hard to really compare Eakins to anyone else. Pretty sure every other coach is concerned with generating and preventing high quality scoring chances. Such a shame this all had to happen with the Oilers after all the crap we've had to watch these last 9 years.

Nelson is just trying to coach like a normal coach would. Figure out the strength of your players and put them in situations to succeed. Get them to work hard in practice and during games. Get players to go to the dirty areas to try to score. Try to minimize high quality chances against by stopping cross-ice passes and shots from the slot. Don't be an egotistical arse and make basically everyone dislike you.

Eakins on the other hand? He was trying to make a name for himself as an innovator. He wanted to revolutionize hockey and failed miserably. His system and the ways he thought everyone should aspire be were more important than any of his players and he kept pushing all of it until it finally got him fired.

Craig MacTavish got his Queen's University MBA a few years ago and decided that a well-educated man like himself should leave a tremendous legacy - he should revolutionize how to build a hockey team, he will bring Moneyball to the NHL. He would be hockey's Billy Beane.

Ralph Krueger was his Art Howe - yes MacT saw the movie and realized he didn't want a hockey coach who wanted to coach a team properly. MacT needed someone on his side, he needed a coach that wanted to create a legacy by revolutionizing the game as well - he needed a Dallas Eakins.

Now, these two needed a Peter Brand to crunch the numbers for them - enter the Oilers hackathon spitting out Tyler Dellow. MacT had his team, now they would dominate the NHL.

As things spiralled out of control in MacT's quest for supremacy, he failed to realize the error of his ways. Why "Moneyball" worked was that Billy Beane was finding under-appreciated players based on individual stats. Baseball is a fantastic game to isolate individual players and analyze their real performance. A smart analyst can find a lot of truth in non-traditional statistics and Billy Beane did.

Hockey is a different game, it is much more difficult to isolate players and analyze them. Dellow and the like took the lazy approach and used team stats like Corsi and PDO to put values on individual players with the flawed argument that bad data X 1000 somehow becomes good data. They never got the concept that you cannot use a statistic that measures the efforts of 12 players and give that to one of them as an individual stat. That is just stupidity.

Believing that Corsi is key because PDO is just luck was the formula. As the losses piled up, MacT, Eakins and Dellow all looked back at Moneyball and said "it takes some time, the A's lost a lot and took some heat before that 20 game win streak. Patience...patience....".

In the movie, the A's made it work in a single season. By the end of the first year of Moneyball, they were a playoff club with undervalued players on the roster. One year came and went for the Oilers and another season - with additional "good Corsi" players added to the roster like Nikita 'Scott Hatteberg' Nikitin - was even worse than year one. The media and fan heat became unbearable and, a devastated MacT had to fire his crown jewel, Dallas Eakins.

The reality is, Corsi can be manipulated. Taking long, low percentage shots can raise a Corsi rating. Giving up a breakaway is the same as a shot from center or a blocked shot according to Corsi. Of course, PDO is not luck. Good players score more often than poor players. Good teams get better chances and convert more of them than crappy teams. Good defensive teams with good goaltenders will always have a higher save % than a team with six third-pair defensemen and mediocre goaltending like the Oilers have. PDO is not luck and Corsi does not measure individual performance.

There was no possible way for MacT's flawed plan to work. He, Eakins and Dellow fell flat on their faces in historically bad fashion - the great "analytics" experiment failed. Until "advanced" stats guys realize they need to isolate and measure individual performance, their ideas will never help an NHL team earn a single point in the standings.

 

[LevelingSolo]

Eakins looked like he had no idea what he was doing at the NHL level


Was the general consensus of him by Toronto fans when he was with the Marlies always that positive?

 

[McOvechking]

A

He's doing the absolute most he can with this atrocious lineup.

 

[TheGuyInTheChair]

Some guys are ready to crown him Coach for the next decade. He's been better than Eakins(who wouldn't be?). I didn't like how he was given the interim job but he seems okay. Still not sure if I want him back next season or not.

C+ maybe

 

[oobga]

Even without Hall the Oilers look better right now than anything we saw under Eakins. Even when Eakins won games late last season it was completely on the back of crazy performances by Scrivens and Fasth while we got dominated every other possible way.