It’s Not Your Fault

It’s not your fault.

It’s not your fault, Dallas, that your goatenders couldn’t stop a thing all year. 

Last year the Oilers got .916 goaltending from Ben Scrivens, .914 goaltending from Viktor Fasth, and .894 goaltending out of Devan Dubnyk. The play of Dubnyk was brutal the year before. So bad, in fact, that the team was done before the clock struck midnight on Halloween. MacT spent assets to get Scrivens and Fasth and they looked at least average if not capable of doing even better with a lightened workload.

This year the Oilers have gotten .890 goaltending from Ben Scrivens and .891 goaltending from Viktor Fasth. Those are sub-Dubnykian numbers from both goalies and I didn’t even think that was actually possible. The team is not getting any kind of help from the most critical position and there’s no question it has played a large role in the coach losing his job.

Last season the team was allowing 32.9 shots per game and Eakins had the Oil tighten that up to just 28.9 shots against per game. They cut out 4 per game against them, went from 26th in the NHL to 13th in the NHL and the lightened workload still couldn’t stem the bleeding. 

Based largely on the goaltending the team’s PDO is 96.7, dead last in the NHL. That number will eventually start to rise. When it does the new coach will look great and the last one will be mocked.

It’s not your fault, Dallas, that your General Manager refused to acquire by any means enough centers to compete in the Western Conference. 

Edmonton under Craig MacTavish fell in love with recent Draftee Leon Draisaitl and projected onto him the man he might be in the future. The GM saw the massive and intensely talented 25 year old that Draisaitl will be when he hits Unrestricted Free Agency and believed he was inserting that player onto Eakins’ roster. That player would have been exactly what the Oilers needed: a faceoff winning, 220lb, offensive centerman with the ability to match up against Thornton, Getzlaf, and Kopitar every night. 

Sadly that man is a figment of MacTavish’s imagination. He doesn’t yet exist and may never. Leon Draisaitl today is just a kid, still highly skilled but a babe among wolves. But MacTavish cut a hole on the roster so big that the big German making the team was inevitable. The belief being that Arcobello could easily do what Gagner did and Dr Drei would dominate.

Is it Eakins’ fault that Draisaitl hasn’t produced? No Oiler forward on the team has a higher percentage of offensive zone starts than Leon Draisaitl at 46.3%. He plays with relatively highly skilled players every game in prime starting position. His minutes have been carefully managed all year but he only has 7 points (2-5-7) to show for it. That’s not good enough for a player who the coach needed to provide real secondary scoring.

It’s not your fault, Dallas, that the losing culture of this team goes deeper than you as a coach are able to address. 

There is something rotten with this franchise and it has been festering since long before coach Dallas Eakins came aboard. The Oilers are a team who sold themselves as a franchise that would lose for a significant time and then magically flick a switch and start winning. Well the plan was flawed from the beginning and we are seeing now, four coaches later, that “The Rebuild” was predicated on a formula that eats out the competitive spirit of the players from the inside and leaves them hollow. 

The Owner wanted a loser. The President of Hockey Operations wanted a loser. The General Manager wanted a loser. They got what they wanted. The Oilers are losers. It’s what they are. It’s who they are. No coach, hired to be fired, can step in and wave a magic wand that fixes this problem.

The natural order of things has been subverted and professional athletes, whose entire lives have been built around competition from the time they were old enough to skate, were told it was OK to not be competitive. The fire that burns inside them that makes them special was allowed to flame out.

That isn’t on Dallas Eakins. It’s not his fault that Jordan Eberle spent the first 25 games of the year under the impression back-checking was optional. It’s not his fault that Justin Schultz couldn’t care any less about his own play in the defensive zone. It’s not on him that the captain of the team had to address how a bunch of millionaires spent their days moping about the locker room.

It’s not your fault, Dallas Eakins, that the biggest problems with this team have not been addressed sufficiently during your tenure as head coach. 

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things to blame Dallas Eakins for, but those big three won’t magically become better just because there’s a new coach behind the bench. Dallas Eakins needed to be let go because the team could not justify that many losses, but this isn’t all on him. This bad team is the roster that MacTavish put together. This pathetic culture is the one Lowe crafted. There’s enough wrong here that there need to be more casualties than just Eakins.