1)Who cares about draft picks anymore? Honestly. If you are an Oilers fan, you have seen enough of highly touted draft picks. You have had your share of hearing about Hope, ie (Hall Omark Paajarvi Eberle) OK, Omark is having a fantastic season in Oklahoma City, but is still not helping the NHL when he’s there. Paajarvi is struggling to crack the St. Luis Blues team, so who cares. Hall has been off to a slow start, and Jordan Eberle leads the team in points… with a mere 15 points in 20 games.
2) Firstly Who on this Oilers’ team could GM Craig MacTavish feel are the core. The players to build around? You would have to think that it would be Hall, Eberle, Nugent-Hopkins, Yakupov, Schultz, Devan Dubnyk but then who else? That’s 6 players. Perhaps he also meant Sam Gagner, whom he often speaks so highly of, maybe even Ales Hemsky, but MacT explicitly said that he was looking to move Hemsky. But ultimately, these 8 forwards are far too similar, there is not enough diversity amongst those players, they are all too much the same.
3) If MacT thinks that he needs to keep all 8 or 9 players that he has identified as essential, he has to be joking. But of course, having a fire sale and trading off everyone won’t help much either. Setting the team back on this never ending rebuild won’t be the answer. Moving one or two players along with a pick or two, may help to round out the team, allowing MacT to obtain some missing complementary pieces. But in order to do that, MacT can’t say all 8 or 9 players as essential.
The fans in Edmonton are demanding playoffs, not the draft lottery. Who can blame them?
4) Knowing how desperate the Oilers’ front office is to get better, the Oilers have a difficult task in trading their top pick, one of their stars and in return gaining key pieces, pieces that are highly coveted around the league. There are not a lot of top line players or top 4 defencemen traded because few if any are available, and there are no guarantees that any moves will help the team. But MacT feels the team is only 3 or 4 pieces away?? Reall??
5) Ultimately the Oilers are in a terrible position. They look worse this year than ever, partly due to injury and partly due to bad goaltending to start the year. They are getting booed off of their home ice, they can’t buy a goal, and they have just traded their biggest and best shot blocking defenceman. To the Calgary Flames.“There is a lot of optimism around the league in terms of our ability to turn things around” MacTavish remarked, but the problem is that the optimism is disappearing in Edmonton. Especially when any players who are mentioned in possible trades are quick to speak up and say that Edmonton is on their no trade list, Edmonton is a city they will not go to. Optimism is running out. Perhaps McTavishs time is running out too?
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