LAST 10 GAMES: FINDING THE INNER SALO
By Lowetide
10 years ago
That old line about your best players needing to be your best players has an application when it comes to the Oilers this season. Injuries, playing out of position, digging the puck out of your own net, the Oilers Jacks and Kings have had a tough start to this season. The last 10 games are showing us things are returning to normal.
If all things were normal—whatever your version of normal is—I’d guess that Hall, Eberle and Nuge would be near the top of the scoring charts and that we wouldn’t see a lot of -12’s and -14’s in the plus minus column.
LAST 10 GAMES, FORWARDS
- Taylor Hall 10, 6-5-11 -3 (40 shots!)
- David Perron 10, 3-6-9 +1
- Jordan Eberle 10, 3-5-8 -3
- Ales Hemsky 10, 2-4-6 +2
- Ryan Nugent-Hopkins 10, 2-4-6 E
- Sam Gagner 10, 2-4-6 -3
- Mark Arcobello 9, 1-3-4 +1
- Ryan Smyth 7, 0-3-3 -1
- Nail Yakupov 10, 1-1-2 -7
- Jesse Joensuu 8, 1-0-1 -6
- Ryan Jones 9, 0-1-1 -1
- Luke Gazdic 6, 0-0-0 -1
- Anton Lander 4, 0-0-0 E
- Boyd Gordon 4, 0-0-0 -2
- Will Acton 3, 0-0-0 -2
The usual suspects at the top of the list, the offense falls off badly after Arco and I do think the Smyth injury has impacted the skill of the bottom 6F’s. Smyth might be old as the hills and twice as dusty, but he can take and make a pass. Yakupov had a tough 10, but he’s still in his first 82 game window and we know from history that things like a slump can happen for young players. I don’t know why he isn’t the trigger man for the #1 PP, but there’s some kind of disconnect there. Anyway, 21 goals from this group in the last 10 games.
LAST 10 GAMES, DEFENSE
- Andrew Ference 10, 1-2-3 +1
- Justin Schultz 10, 1-2-3 -5
- Jeff Petry 8, 0-2-2 -1
- Nick Schultz 10, 0-2-2 -3
- Anton Belov 8, 0-1-1 -1
- Denis Grebeshkov 4, 0-1-1 -1
- Phil Larsen 5, 0-1-1 +2
- Corey Potter 3, 0-1-1 E
- Martin Marincin 2, 0-0-0 E
Interesting to see how many defensemen the club has been running through in 10 game sets this season. A lot of turnover, as you might expect from a struggling crew. Ference and Larsen in the black, Justin Schultz the only one with a ghastly minus and Marincin makes his NHL debut.
LAST 10 GAMES, GOAL
- Devan Dubnyk 9, .880 3.95
- Ilya Bryzgalov 4, .939 2.11
Plus Jason LaBarbera played one game and stopped 12 shots in 39 minutes. The story here is twofold: Bryz has been exceptional in a very small sample size and the evidence against Dubnyk is so overwhelming there’s no one left to defend him. I don’t know how he found his inner Salo but lordy it’s going to cost him a lot of free agent money.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
The season is long lost and playing for pride has to be a burden for this group because that’s all they’ve been playing for since arriving in the NHL (with few exceptions). Still, the scorers are scoring and there are some numbers in the black on the blue, so the return of Ilya Bryzgalov may signal better days.
The schedule up to Christmas suggests the Oilers are going to need outstanding performances from all three sets in order to win as many as they lose.
(My thanks to Dennis King for the Title idea)
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