Monday Mailbag – June 8th

It’s the time of the week that everyone loves the most – Mailbag time! As always, I’ve taken your questions and sent them out to our writers to get the answers you’ve always been looking for. I say it every where, but this segment is entirely dependent on you guys to make work so send me your questions. You can email me at baggedmilk@oilersnation or hit me up on Twitter at @jsbmbaggedmilk. Enjoy.

Sure, there’s a chance. The team got a good look at him at the last training camp, so they know him as well as anybody. The Oilers have extra picks and if they spend one of them on Tkachev after the third round it’s fine by me.

There’s a lot of institutional memory still left in the management ranks. I’ve never really believed the Oilers would make a reach pick for a pint-sized forward, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they strongly considered Tkachev with a later selection.

I don’t think the ship has sailed, but it is still going to be less likely than when MacT was still the GM. I want to say their later third round pick or anything after would be a reasonable bet. I know there are those that don’t like what the player has accomplished, but he did have a fairly serious injury on the year and he looked really good in the Memorial Cup. I’m all for adding skill and creativity.

Don’t see why. He was 19 and only averaged one point a game in QMJHL. Those players are a dime a dozen. He isn’t gifted enough for me to waste a pick on. If he was 17 turning 18 then maybe, because you’d hope he’d grow, but he is 19. I’d pass.

I don’t think they’ll reach for him, but if Tkachev is available at a reasonable number there’s every chance Edmonton selects him. The young man didn’t have a great season or Memorial Cup, so could be a bargain late in the draft. Looks like a big risk/reward pick which I like, so hope they take him (depending on number). 

I feel badly for him with this whole thing. He thought he had a contract a signed up and than it falls through. There aren’t many sure things in the world of hockey. I would not be reaching for him in the draft. The Oilers needs to continue to add D, goaltenders and solid characters players that can grind out wins.

I think the biggest thing working against him is that he’s so tiny. The Rempart’s website has him listed at 5’8”, 163lbs. That is comically small. Even Tyler Johnson is listed at 183! He did look great in training camp last year, but he didn’t go blow the doors off the QMJHL as a 19 year old. Both of those things considered I feel like Chiarelli will pass on him. If he’s still available in the third round I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to taking another flyer on him, but another even smaller, undersized winger doesn’t seem to be in the cards for the Oilers anymore. Best case scenario is we repeat history; Tkachev goes undrafted and the Oilers sign him to an ACTUALLY LEGIT THIS TIME pro contract.

I think the ship has sailed with the coming of a new management team. I mean, Chiarelli could use a later round pick on him but why would he? MacT tried to sign him, and that has nothing to do with the new GM. That being said, if he’s around and you have a pick that’s in the range of where he would be landing why not? You have to feel bad for the kid that he thought he had an NHL contract only to have a technicality rob him of it. 

Main challenge is not having seen a lot of them live and having to rely on video and the opinions of hockey ops people he is just getting to know. Can’t even lean as heavily as he normally would on his coach because McLellan wasn’t here either.

Chiarelli is going to come into the job with a certain level of familiarity with the Oilers’ players, and naturally he’ll make use of whatever resources he has. That’s video, it’s analytics, it’s conversations with people in the organization (even as he assesses those people). The difficulty is that he has a very short period of time to become intimately familiar with a club he’s mostly seen from a distance, and that the incumbent front office people he’ll be dealing with are folks that he won’t necessarily be sure of himself. 

I think he’s going to lean on the people in the organization a lot. He’s a busy guy and I’m not sure hours of video is necessary to know that Pitlick isn’t a great prospect. Without having seen most of his RFAs over the year he has no idea what kind of strides they made or which direction their games were headed. He doesn’t know much about these guys at all. The Oilers might benefit from having a very cold and detached view of their system though, so I’m not worried yet.

Video rarely lies. He told me he is watching a lot of it, but also taking input from the staff and coaches. I don’t see many major challenges with his RFAs. Marincin, Davidson and Schultz will be qualified. I think Miller has done enough to get another year, and same with Pitlick. I think he walks away from Aulie, Fraser, Hamilton, Bunz and  Lain.

I think he’d have some knowledge of the players from an outsider’s POV and that has value. He’ll now have inside info on the group and that may impact the decision. I don’t think Edmonton’s RFA group is especially good, so aside from offering a bad deal to Justin Schultz there doesn’t appear to be much danger.

He is watching video, calling on people inside the organization and maybe even coaches who coached against the Oilers this season. The challenge in the short term is for him to form an opinion of his own on players he has not watched play live a lot. For this reason I think he is quite slow to pull the trigger on a big deal without knowing his current roster and top prospect players.

I haven’t the faintest clue how any of that even works. I have to think that Chiarelli is putting a lot of trust in the scouts/video coaches/Rexall janitors/etc considering he inherited all of them, and has yet to bring in his own people to fill those spots, and theoretically they would have the pulse on the players already in the system. I’ve got a feeling that there won’t be a ton of roster turnover before the season starts, and I’m sure Chiarelli would like to see with his own eyes how the players currently here fit into the grand plan. 

In terms of challenges I think the biggest one he’ll face is trying to bolster the roster and finally fill all those gaping holes without mortgaging too much of the future. He has no real ties to any players currently on the roster/in the system, which may either be a great thing or a terrible thing. Time will tell.

I assume there’s a lot of asking the magic 8-ball and reading Lowetide/Willis player breakdowns. If that’s not how Chiarelli is scouting then I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO TELL YOU! Maybe he’s on YouTube? It’s been a while since the NHL has had a Fabian Brunnstrom to talk about. 

Yes, but let’s move on from Dallas Eakins, shall we?

Coaching is a highly competitive field, and a lot of very highly-touted coaches end up having to spend several seasons in places like Europe and the AHL before they get a second chance. Look at Guy Boucher as an example; this guy was an up-and-coming star and he’s spent the last two seasons in Switzerland and looks likely to spend a third. My guess is that Eakins lands somewhere — maybe as an NHL assistant, maybe as a head coach in Europe or the AHL — and spends some time in that role before he gets another crack at a head coaching job.

I can’t see any NHL team stepping up to hire Eakins. What he did here, from his arrogant entrance to the doughnut fiasco to turning Yakupov into a third liner, not to mention his atrocious record, are all working against him. Worse than all that, even if somebody wanted to take a chance on Eakins, this ridiculous compensation rule is pressuring the Oilers to ask for a draft pick in return for his services. So team X would need to completely forget all the garbage Eakins did as head coach of the Oilers AND be willing to mortgage their future (more than hiring Eakins would do) just to hire him. It isn’t happening.

There are no head coaching vacancies and he wasn’t a serious contender. I’d say it impacts him, and he, like players who have bad seasons, will need to re-establish himself.

I think there’s a chance he’ll need to go back to AHL (or junior, he is rumored to be in the running for the Vancouver Giants job) but that’s pretty much par for the course. I bet he learned a lot from the Edmonton experience and hope he makes it back to the NHL and has success.

Yes. He is a smart guy and will adjust to become a different coach next time.

Immediate chances, absolutely. He’ll land on his feet; despite his disastrous Oilers tenure he still has a solid record as a minor league coach. But right now you have to think he’s pretty radioactive to NHL teams. But NHL memories are long and very spotty. Ted Nolan’s name ALWAYS gets brought up whenever a team is looking for a coach, purely because of a Jack Adams win almost TWENTY years ago! Aside from that he’s had virtually no NHL success and coached three OHL/QMJHL champions in a 15 year span. But that Jack Adams keeps his name in the conversation and gets his foot in the door. 

I have to think that over the next few years Eakins’ 100 game NHL stint will slowly fade from memory and that minor league success/hype will come back to the forefront. And if the NHL has taught me anything it’s that there is ALWAYS room for ex-third/fourth liners in some kind of front office/coaching capacity. It’s just science!

His immediate chances? Absolutely. His tenure as the head coach of the Oilers was a train wreck from the minute he took the doughnuts away from the media to the water bottle fiasco with Taylor Hall to the absolutely demolition of the power play. Eakins is a smart guy though, and I think he’ll approach his next job differently. He may have to wait a while but I think he’ll get another chance. 

This year it is, although both Jon Cooper and Joel Quenneville are adept at getting their skilled players to compete and play with a lot of intensity. The best substitute for sheer size is willingness to compete. Lots of that on both teams. That aside, there’s some decent size on both teams in key positions.

I’m going to say “no” because the Blackhawks have been small and fast and dominant for most of the last decade and we haven’t seen teams imitate them in that regard; we like to call the NHL a copycat league but it’s only true to a point (Detroit, for example, has been patient with prospects and ignored fighters for years and years while the rest of the league has continued rushing its star kids into the majors and hiring enforcers). With that said, I think conventional wisdom dictates a balance in team composition; managers want clubs that can keep up with fast teams and go toe-to-toe with heavy clubs.

Heavy is still good. Fast is still good. What all these teams that win have in common is that they control the game. They do it with solid tactics, or by being physically dominant, or with speed, or with depth, or with just a few high end pieces. There is no one way to build a good hockey team. The Oilers have high end pieces but they overloaded the forwards. They’ve had fast players but not fast teams. They’ve had heavy players but only on the fourth lines. I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that there’s more than one way to get the job done and changes need to be made to this group. I’d say they are closer to being a Tampa Bay than they are the old Bruins, but who knows what Chia can accomplish?

I don’t think so. Kings had size and speed and won last year. If they were any good in shootouts they would have made playoffs, and once they are in they have proven they can win. Big skill will never be looked as a negative.

There’s more than one way to win a championship. The two teams in the SCF this year will more closely resemble what the mature Oilers will probably look like than, say the LA Kings.

The speed in the final four teams line ups is very impressive. They fly around the ice. They do have size sprinkled in there as well. Speed is one way that can get past a team really trying to grind out wins along the walls.

2011: THE YEAR OF BIG BULLIES!

2012: THE YEAR OF INSANE POSSESSION AND SUFFOCATING DEFENSIVE SYSTEMS!

2013: THE YEAR OF INCREDIBLY WELL BUILT TEAMS TOP TO BOTTOM!

2014: THE YEAR OF CORSI AGAIN! 

2015: THE YEAR OF DRAFTING NOTHING BUT FORWARDS UNDER SIX FEET! 

The goalposts move every year. But if you break it down, the thing that all those teams have in common is they’re ALL highly skilled teams. The Bruins did smash everything in sight on their way to the cup, but they also scored in bunches and had world class goaltending. The same can be said about pretty much every Cup winner in history. 

I’ve also maintained that the whole thing is basically catching lightning in a bottle (no pun intended). A team can ride a hot goaltender who’s gone supernova or a hot line who can’t stop scoring and beat teams on paper who should be much, much better (basically the entire Oilers 06 run). Long story short teams should focus on building rosters with the best players, rather than trying to fit some specific mold, and hope the coin toss that is the playoffs lands in their favour.

I love this question. If any team wins the Stanley Cup with a slightly different makeup they automatically become the poster children from what NHL teams should look like. Fast and Skilled is always going to be important just like Big and Skilled will always be valuable. It’s more about getting the right mix of guys with skill and teeth that can push you through four rounds. 

Lottery tickets — both given and received. Nothing says “I don’t really care” like lottery tickets.

I’m not sure the worst gift I’ve given; people don’t generally tell you if your gifts stink. With that said, about a decade ago I bought my girlfriend (now my wife) a beautiful watch with an incredibly difficult-to-read face; she’s a practical woman and not the kind of person to walk around with a lovely but indecipherable timepiece. If you’re wondering why I bought an unreadable watch for my girlfriend, I’m going to plead “I was a dumb kid”. As for the worst gift I’ve been given, I appreciated the thought so I’m not going to describe it in any detail; all I’ll say is that it’s tough to buy decor for somebody if you don’t really know what they actually like.

Worst gift I ever gave? I’m not a great gift giver. I have some ideas every once in a while but I’d prefer someone just give me a list so I can get them what they want. Worst gift I ever received was at Christmas one year when my Mom gave me a cell phone (not a smart phone) after I explicitly spent months saying I had no need nor desire for a cell phone. I was quite loud about not wanting one at all and sure as shit that’s what I opened up on Christmas morning. It was obviously a 2-for-1 deal because my sister got one too (it’s what she wanted). I said thank you and returned it later. Actually my mom has two or three more gifts that run in contention for worst gifts I’ve ever received. She’s also given the best gifts I’ve ever received so it’s really all over the place. Sorry Mom.

I gave a fake lottery ticket once. The one that makes person believe they won, but then you have to break the bad news. It was funny however. I’m sure the pet rock I painted for my mom was a pretty bad gift, even though she never said anything.

Worst gift: Never had one that sticks out. One of my best friends had a one-nighter with a girl and she gave him crabs. That has to be the worst gift you could give someone.

A dear friend of mine was in NYC and before leaving asked me if there was anything I wanted. I said “a framed picture of Yankee Stadium” and God love her she brought me back a framed picture of Shea Stadium. Not a ‘worst gift’ but the first thing I thought about. 

Worst? I bought my son a train set when he was nine but he didn’t love it. Never paid any attention to it. Ignored it. Train set is mine now. I love trains. It was a great damn train set too. Damn kid. Still pisses me off. 

Worst given- Shampoo to Gregor

Worst received – Cowboy outdoor riding jacket 

The worst gift I’ve ever gotten was probably in grade foir, when we played Secret Santa/Yankee Swap type of game, and I ended up with this porcelain angel statue thing. If there’s one thing an eight year old boy wants it’s DEFINITELY that and not some cool codebreaker board game thing that was up for grabs. 

And I’ve never given a bad gift because I’m an incredibly thoughtful and awesome human being.

My great-grandma used to babysit me every day when I was a kid and my parents were at work, and she used to make me drink these cans of tomato juice that I absolutely hated. I used to try and find creative ways of dumping that crap out before ol’ g-ma would notice. She took that as me loving them, and for my birthday one year I got a case of effing tomato juice. Nothing fires up a seven year old like tomato juice.

Worst gift I’ve given has to be this Columbo DVD set that I gave to my dad when I was a kid. I went to his place recently and he asked me if I could grab something from his room for him. As I’m grabbing the item he asked for I look up in his closet to see that DVD set that I had bought him 10 years earlier — still in the wrapping. Never been opened. I asked him about it afterward and he said he didn’t like Columbo but he used to put it on for napping purposes only. Nice job, bm. Nice job.