It’s been four games since the “cancer” of the Edmonton Oilers, coach Dallas Eakins has been replaced and as this writer has confidently predicted, it has made no difference.
Eakins departed with a 7-19-5 record. His successor Craig MacTavish/Todd Nelson is 0-2-2. There is not one win as a Christmas gift for either management, ownership and fans in gratitude for the replacement of the “troublemaker”.
Instead Eakins is the latest notch on the belts of the current roster of players, dating back to 2009, including Eakins, Craig MacTavish, the late Pat Quinn, Tom Renney, and Ralph Krueger. That’s five coaches in five years and if Nelson continues on his dismal path, he will be gone at the end of the season and that will speed up the firing process.
It is this writer’s opinion that the players deliberately tried to get Eakins fired almost from the start of the season – just like the Maple Leaf players did in the 1980s with John Brophy, and many other coaches have been both in the NHL and in other sports. And in the case of Edmonton and Eakins, what the current players also did to his four predecessors.
Surely by now with all the coaching changes and the continued dismal results, the fans must be aware that there IS a “cancer” in Edmonton, but it is not at the coaching level. When the second worst Western Conference team, the Arizona Coyotes can walk into Edmonton and easily defeat the Oilers 5-1, it is clear that there is something more wrong than the departed coaches.
The only good thing in fact is from Eakins’ standpoint. He is now out of his agony, out of a nightmare. One hopes that he, Krueger, and Renney will return someday to the NHL as a head coach again, their dreams not ruined forever by a poisonous environment over which they had little control.
With Eakins’ departure, that leaves only two culprits left, the players and management/ownership.
The current roster is mostly made up of players who were in many cases the overall number one pick in the NHL draft and many other high draft choices. Normally the pattern for sports franchises is like that of a life of a human being, a bell curve. The team starts out building with young players and as they mature they hit a peak for a few years before tumbling down and rebuilding again.
But when you are down and when you STAY down, there is something abnormally wrong. These number one players were supposed to be stars in the NHL by now but there is not one who is even close to being at the level he was predicted to be when he was drafted.
That means either the players were overrated or they have been grossly mismanaged.
If it is the former, perhaps Oiler management needs to hire a spy, an outsider who will go into the dressing room and find out who the malcontents are, the unruly players who have become uncoachable and clear up the poisonous atmosphere by trading them as soon as possible.
But if they have been mismanaged, then there has to be a severe shakeup in the higher ranks of the organization. The poison has trickled down from above and has to cleared up there before the Oilers can get healthy once more.
Once again the Maple Leafs provide the best example, both in the days they were owned by Harold Ballard and later when they were owned by the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund.
Already the Oilers 2014-15 season is over and they are now playing for Connor McDavid.
Normally this writer would be glad to see the next projected link in Canada’s Golden Hockey Chain, dating from Maurice Richard to Sidney Crosby play for a Canadian team. But with the poisonous atmosphere in Edmonton, I would prefer that he play somewhere else – even Arizona – if it means that he will not be ruined too.
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