The Edmonton Oilers are far from a perfect hockey team and honestly, that’s a little bit disappointing.
Sure, that might seem like a high bar, but this team came within one win of capturing the Stanley Cup last season and the expectation coming into this season was that this group would be determined to show that they were the class of the league.
I wanted to see them absolutely dominate from game one until game 82 and lock up home-ice advantage for as long as they could.
That obviously has not happened. There have been some serious speed bumps through the first 60 games of this season and now just winning the Pacific Division is going to be a serious challenge.
I don’t mean to sound all doom and gloom, especially considering the Oilers are 34-19-4 on the season. That is still a great record and the Oilers are a very good team.
But they aren’t perfect. In the 10th season of the Connor McDavid era, I think the bar should be very high and the truth is that they aren’t living up to that.
So how can they become perfect? Well, that’s probably not going to happen through in-season acquisitions. They don’t have the assets to make multiple trades for impactful players.
Yes, a goaltender would certainly help. They need someone who has the ability to steal them a game and this season, Stuart Skinner has not been that guy.
The reason I’m hesitant to say that they need a goaltender in order to win in the playoffs is because we’ve seen them win in the playoffs with Skinner and his backup Calvin Pickard and we’ve also seen long stretches, like the 16-game winning streak last season, where Skinner has proven he can be a goalie who steals games.
They’re capable of it but this season has been far from good. It’s not a popular thing to say right now, but I truly believe Stuart Skinner has it in him to bring this team to a Stanley Cup.
Should the Oilers be open to adding a goalie to work in tandem with Skinner who has a bit more of a higher upside than Pickard? Absolutely they should.
Is there a player like that on the market? I’m not sure.
John Gibson comes with a very high cap hit and while he’s been very good this season, it’s the first team in five seasons where he’s been above a .905. It would be very hard to make this deal work given the Oilers’ cap constraints.
If you don’t think you can upgrade the goaltending, then how about making the goalies’ lives easier?
I spoke with former Oilers goaltender Devan Dubnyk recently and he talked about how some of the goals against are a product of the system in front of the team.
“You can watch the chaos in both games,” said Dubnyk, who was talking about the team’s weekend losses to Philadelphia and Washington, “that can start to affect the way a goalie plays and you can see in his movement that he just isn’t trusting what’s in front of them.”
Dubnyk talked about some goals that seem to go in because the goaltender wasn’t set but this could be a product of the team’s defensive play being unpredictable.
“It’s a full team thing. They have to get structured in front of them (the goalies).”
The Oilers need to add another impact defenseman to the mix. They have a group of six defensemen who are really struggling right now.
Evan Bouchard has not been himself all season. He is turning over pucks in very dangerous areas and the kinds of plays that are happening two or three times a game are the types of plays that should be happening once every two or three games.
Still, they need his puck-moving ability out there and he’s still really good at defending on the rush.
He’s not alone when it comes to struggling blueliners either. Mattias Ekholm has looked slow on a lot of nights recently and Brett Kulak has been poor since coming back from the break.
Darnell Nurse and Ty Emberson have both had really solid seasons thus far and as of late, haven’t stuck out as bad as some of their teammates.
The point I’m getting at here is that they need to give that group another impact piece to support them. Go get another minute-eating player who can not only make Darnell Nurse’s’ life easier but ease the workload on Bouchard and Ekholm and properly slot Brett Kulak back on the third pair where he can play with a consistent partner.
John Klingberg was supposed to be that guy, but he clearly isn’t.
I was very skeptical about the Klingberg experiment from the jump and after watching him for seven games, I’m ready to say that he is not going to be an answer in the Oilers top-four.
If you give him another 15 games to continue to knock off the rust, could the results improve? It’s possible and I’m sure he’d get a little bit better, but the Oilers need a lot more in that position and they can run the risk that comes with just hoping Klingberg improves.
There might not be a truly impactful goaltender on the market but there are defensemen who would help the Oilers.
Jamie Oleksiak, Brandon Carlo, and Mike Matheson are all players who have been mentioned as potentially being available and I think they would all be great additions. They will be expensive but Stan Bowman needs to buck up and pay the price.
This team needs another impactful top-four defenseman because they cannot go into the playoffs with either Stecher or Klingberg playing the kind of minutes they currently are.
