Got to chatting with an NHL scout about the joke that is the Edmonton Oilers and he said, only half-kiddingly, that there should be a league-implemented rule that limits the amount of top-five picks a team can get in a certain amount of years.
In other words, at some point, you should get punished — not rewarded — for gross incompetence.
Nothing ever changes in Edmonton. Here we go again with another fired coach, Dallas Eakins, who talked a good game but seemed in over his head with the Oilers well on their way to a fifth top-three pick in the past six years, and maybe even fourth first overall pick in six years.
Doesn't seem fair that a team that was able to draft Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Nail Yakupov first overall and Leon Draisaitl third overall (regardless of what you think of them) is well on its way to being so bad yet again that it's going to luck right into potential franchise-changers Connor McDavid or Jack Eichel.
Eakins was sacked after winning 36 of 113 games. This season, the Oilers have gone a span with one win in five weeks and have beaten one Western Conference team all season.
They have drafted poorly (hit on almost no post-first-rounders since 2011), have no depth because of it, continue to make bad free-agent pickups and trade for bad players, haven't improved at all defensively and have substandard goaltending.
Ten days after a state-of-the-union address to publicly give Eakins a vote of confidence and remind fans and the media that he shouldn't be lumped in with the previous regime, Craig MacTavish fired Eakins and admitted "there's lots of blood all over my hands."
The roster is largely MacT's. He signed or traded for Nikita Nikitin, Teddy Purcell, Mark Fayne, Benoit Pouliot, Ben Scrivens and Viktor Fasth and allowed Draisaitl, at 19, to ludicrously experience this losing culture — the same one that has handicapped players like Hall, Nugent-Hopkins, Justin Schultz and stalled Jordan Eberle — instead of sending Draisaitl back to junior.
