Monday Mailbag – What’s wrong with the power play?

Another Monday is here and that means it’s time to learn something waste company time! As always, the mailbag is the perfect opportunity to soak up some of that sweet, sweet hockey knowledge laid forth by our writers and to argue with us about it in the comments section. If you’d like to get in on next week’s mailbag, you can email me your question to baggedmilk@oilersnation.com or hit me up on Twitter at @jsbmbaggedmilk. I always need peeps to chime in so please send them to me. Have a good week, everybody.

He’s got a lot of moxy. He battles. He’s mentally tough. That’s a start.

He’s not reliable enough to count on and bad goals seem to come in bunches.

He makes some pretty nice saves and he grinds his way through games even when he allows a bad goal early. I don’t see a starter here, but he’s certainly a capable NHL backup, it seems.

Brossoit still looks like he’s not ready for the NHL. He’s a tough case. As McLellan mentioned in one of his pressers, LB makes a lot of high-difficulty saves, but struggles with the easy saves. Is this because the speed of the game and shots are a little too high for him? Or does he have the skill and no confidence? I will always be a fan of Brossoit as a goaltender. I don’t think he’s doing a terrible job stepping in for Talbot, but I don’t think he’s doing a fantastic job either.

To me, it’s wild how Brossoit can change so much from period to period. He really needs to work on his consistency and I think it’s going to be tough if he plays as little as he was before Talbot went down. I still have time for LB, and think he can be a good goaltender, but he needs to find a way to eliminate the softies because there are games when he looks really good and other where… well… not so much.

He’ll mix and match as game situations dictate. We’ve already seen that.

I bet Todd is pulling his hair out because it feels like there just aren’t any right answers. We’re probably getting close to seeing Leon and Connor together again.

I’m not really sure what else he can do. The blender has seen almost every iteration of lines at this point. I’m sure Leon and McDavid will be back together sooner rather than later because the third line with Strome, Nathan Walker, Anton Slepyshev, or whoever else isn’t doing anything.

Right now the team is struggling with effort as a whole from every single person. This makes it tough to decipher how successful and effective our lineups are because everyone is sucking at once.

I was wondering that too. Having the three Cs split up means that all of them are playing fewer minutes than they otherwise would. That said, Draisaitl is paid like a guy that’s supposed to carry his own line and he hasn’t done that yet so it’s an interesting situation. I would try him with Nuge again and see if they can’t work something out, because Jesse Puljujarvi is looking good with Connor right now.

Power plays ebb and flow. Oilers ended a long goal-less drought on the road trip. Can’t draw anything up that hasn’t been drawn up already. Success depends on executing what’s on the board.

Drop Letestu or Lucic and play Puljujarvi in those spots. The kid is dying to get set up for that one-timer. Let him loose.

The power play hasn’t been great but it hasn’t been terrible either. A key, I find, is that the team gets fewer power play chances than anyone else, and if you aren’t getting the reps, you grip your stick a little tighter and try to feather that perfect pass rather than taking a shot.

I would like to see the Oilers score more goals on the powerplay than they previously have.

I wish Puljujarvi would be the shooter on the boards. I don’t know what Todd has against putting him there, but that’s what I want. The kid has a booming shot and is not afraid to use it, something the power play has been missing virtually all year.

Wrote an item on my take. It’s a card a coach can play, but only so often.

Sometimes people need to be yelled at. Maybe even a lot. I don’t know. In my professional life I don’t typically raise my voice when I’m dealing with adults. So when it happens it catches people off guard. That’s the point. It should be jarring. I would like to think a coach is doing that to change behavior. It only works if you aren’t screaming all the time.

You can only do it so often, but based on the way the team played against Philadelphia, it was probably a good time to do so.

Frankly, I don’t think we see enough videos of Todd yelling at the team. I’m sure he does it a lot, and they deserve every bit of it. But there does come a time where you can only yell at them so much. If they don’t respond well the first time you yell at them, they might not respond any different the 10th time. Again, we don’t know what’s going on behind the dressing room doors or how Todd has been coaching them so it’s tough to say.

I don’t have any problem with it. If you think that he was too tough on them then you’ve probably never played any competitive sports in your life. I remember coaches yelling at us like that when I was in Bantam and Midget, let alone the NHL. Toughen up.

Trainwreck.

Ok. Here we go:

Redlight Cowboy

Crossing Jordan

Ocean’s 11 Right Wingers

Dude, Where’s My Playoff Team?

My Klef Foot

Todd Versus The Volcano

Connor McDavid and The Chamber of Disappointment?

Shame

Weekend at Bernie’s. Why? Because it looks like someone is trying to make the corpse that used to be the Edmonton Oilers live again.

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