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.
It was also MacT who fired Ralph Krueger for Eakins even though it looked like the Oilers were making improvements, as modest as they were.
There comes a point where losing is all you know. Hall might be a dynamite scorer, but he's been horrendous defensively, prone to the mind-boggling nightly turnovers and experienced nothing but losses since being drafted in 2010.
Now, according to TSN Insider Darren Dreger, MacTavish is willing to listen to offers for everybody, including Hall.
"It would be a shame to leave this group now, wouldn't feel right," Hall said. "We want to make it to the final stage, a contending team in this league.
"There has been almost zero success since I've been here. Maybe [after] one coach you think, 'Maybe the next one is going to be the guy to bring us there.' But after a while, you start looking in the mirror."
Maybe a change of scenery would do Hall wonders like it has NHL leading scorer Tyler Seguin, the No. 2 pick in 2010 who has developed into a star since being dealt from Boston to Dallas. Or, maybe all this losing and all the bad habits he has picked up in Edmonton have embedded themselves in his being.
MacTavish will try to find out. Oddly, Todd Nelson has been brought up from Oklahoma City and will be on the bench as the official interim coach (yes, now the league's worst team is paying two former coaches and an interim one), but MacTavish will join the bench, too, and walk the locker room daily so he can, as he says, look players eyeball to eyeball and figure out what they're all about.
Eakins joked that when MacTavish called him to his house for a meeting last week, "I knew it wasn't come get your Christmas present."
Another way of looking at it is MacTavish did give Eakins a Christmas present. He put him out of his misery and let him escape the league's worst situation.
NHL short takes
X's and O's tell long tale
Talented former Star Tribune intern Alex Prewitt, now the Capitals beat writer for the Washington Post, wrote the perfect lede for the Caps' 20-round marathon shootout loss to Florida:
By the end, when the dust had settled on NHL's longest shootout ever and the visitors had begun reconciling a loss with the thrill of making history, the boxscore looked like the love note of an overzealous middle-schooler.
For the Washington Capitals: XXXOXXOXXOOXXXXXOXXX
For the Florida Panthers: XXXOXXOXXOOXXXXXOXXO
Nick Bjugstad ended things when he got to shoot twice because the teams batted around, so to speak.
Tweeted Panthers goalie Roberto Luongo at @strombone1, "I blacked out what just happened???"
Five times the Panthers faced must-score situations to keep the shootout alive. They scored each time.
"I've never seen anything like that," Luongo, in real life, said.
Dynamic Iowa duo
Iowa GM Jim Mill faced an awkward situation Tuesday when the Baby Wild hosted Rockford. In the middle of the second period, Mill got a call from Wild GM Chuck Fletcher that Darcy Kuemper was sick and Niklas Backstrom was getting sick during Minnesota's game in Chicago.
Fletcher needed John Curry pulled from Iowa's game so he could get to Minnesota to maybe start but definitely back up Wednesday's game vs. Boston.
Mill got word to Iowa's video coach with eight minutes left in the second to not make a scene but to whisper to Johan Gustafsson to get ready. During the second intermission, Mill went to the locker room to tell coach John Torchetti to pull Curry despite a 3-1 lead.
Curry made 33 saves through two periods and Gustafsson stopped all 25 shots he saw in the third for 58 saves between the two. That inspired center Zack Phillips to tweet at @zackphillips7, "Has anyone ever seen goalies on the same team be two of the three stars of the game before...?"
Wild's week ahead
Tuesday: 6 p.m. vs. Philadelphia (FSN Plus)
Saturday: 6 p.m. vs. Winnipeg (FSN)
Player to watch:
Jakub Voracek, Flyers
Scooped up in a trade with Columbus, the skilled forward was surprisingly tied for second in league scoring heading into the weekend.
VOICES
« There's just no excitement to our game. It's been flat, you know? »
Zach Parise on the Wild's play the past month.