Category Archives: Michael Sifeldeen

Edmonton Oilers, International, Michael Sifeldeen, NHL

McJesus and the World Cup Promised Land

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(I’ve got a copy of The Hockey News’ World Cup preview magazine in front of me as I write this, so if you’ve got a problem with any of the stats I’m quoting, take it up with them.) Ok, perfect. While the hockey world tries to figure out if they give a shit or not about the World Cup of Hockey, I’m sitting here looking at the rosters and immediately coming to the conclusion that Team North America is the team to beat, and then also seeing quickly after that no one who matters agrees with me. So, now, I’m going to go over a few key World Cup facts and figures here, and inject a healthy dose of bias and starry-eyed opinionated commentary to try and pull you firmly onto the Team NA bandwagon with me. Many of our more naysaying readers may be saying nay right now to Team North America’s chances of winning this tournament, and I’m going tell them, in as many words, why they’re dead wrong. Ready? Let’s do it.

Team NA is not significantly smaller or lighter than the other teams

Here are the average heights and weights of all the teams competing in this tournament:

Canada: 6’2″, 207lbs
Sweden: 6’1″, 200lbs
Finland: 6’1″, 199lbs
USA: 6’2″, 210lbs (Jesus Christ, get out of here, Byfuglien, you’re screwing up the metrics)
Russia: 6’1″, 200lbs
Czech Republic: 6’1″, 205lbs
Europe: 6’1″, 204lbs

And finally, Team North America coming in at a very respectable average height and weight of 6’2″, 200lbs. The NA boys have an inch on 5/8 teams, and weigh the same as or more than three others. This is a non-issue at these averages.

Team NA is significantly younger than any other team

The average ages of the World Cup teams:

Canada: 28.7
Sweden: 28.7
Finland: 25.9
USA: 29.0
Russia: 27.0
Europe: 29.9
Czech Republic: 27.3

And again, we have Team North America coming in at a young, but respectable, 21.7 years old on average. This is an age range where most of the players have about two-to-three years in the NHL under their belts, so they’re not green rookies, and they are at the age where their speed and reflexes will almost certainly be at or near their career high.

Team NA is Faster Than Any Other Team, and It’s Not Close

McDavid, Eichel, Larkin, Gaudreau, Droin, MacKinnon… this team is obscenely fast. Tell me how the defensive monsters on the Canadian squad like Doughty and Weber, or the Americans’
Johnson or Byfuglien are supposed to exert their power over these kids if they’re too big and slow to even keep up with them? Which leads me to the next point…

Defensive Size and Grit Won’t Matter*

It’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t a typical NHL playoff series grind, and won’t even really be reminiscent of regular season games. This is a short tournament. There won’t be significant contact, certainly no dirty plays with an NHL season about to start and a KHL season already underway, and fighting is out of the question. So where exactly do the big, intimidating bodies of the other national teams have a significant advantage over the quickness and skill of the North Americans?

*(09/10 Post-pre-tourney CAN vs USA games update: … *Except* for the CAN/USA games, apparently. Jesus.)

Plus, the Team NA Defensive Lineup is Amazing in Its Own Right

Ekblad, Ghost Bear, Jones, Murray, Parayko, Rielly, and Trouba? Are you kidding me? You’re looking at the future of NHL defence right now, and these guys haven’t even entered the prime of their careers yet. They’re dynamic and intelligent, and they can eat minutes along with the best of ’em. I’m not even kind of worried about this aspect of the team.

Don’t Worry about Team NA’s Goaltending

I laugh really, really hard and obnoxiously every time someone says the goaltending of Team North America is going to be their achilles heel. Yes, I too am super concerned about rookie-playoff-record-15-game-winning-Stanley-Cup-champion Matt Murray and All-Star Game player and Ducks’ 23-year-old bona fide starter John Gibson.

Puh-lease. These guys are killer. Obviously they’re not a Carey Price or a Henrik Lundqvist yet (I spelled The King’s name right the first time, just so you know), but what does that matter in a tiny preseason tournament? We aren’t testing these guys over the course of a 60-start season.

That’s the root of the problem with most criticism levied at this squad: it presumes the need for a bigger sample size than is necessary or warranted for the format and length of the tournament. Is anyone arguing that, historically, experience and grit wins championships? Of course not. But for the glorified preseason exhibition series the World Cup is poised to be, traditional evaluative factors don’t apply. Team North America is going to skate circles around the competition. They’re going to score ridiculous goals and come up with whacky, inventive shit that will wins them games because they’re young and fast and skilled, and that’s what’s going to matter.

In Conclusion

I wrote the bulk of this piece before the first pre-tournament games had taken place, so let me just acknowledge how wrong I was about the whole “no dirty plays, etc” bit. Clearly I underestimated the classlessness of some of the American squad (*cough*Kesler you still suck*cough*). So let me amend part of my statements to say that, for the majority of the teams, this isn’t going to be an all-out war of who can play the most boneheaded and outmoded brand of hockey.

I stand by my overall assessment that the North Americans are going to win it all based on their skill and speed, because they’re never going to have to play the Americans, because the Canadians will dispatch them before the group final round.

Where North America will win.

Because McJeez/Johnny Hockey/Eich is the most ridiculous first line I’ve ever heard of in my life and I refuse to stop fanboying. Goodnight, and may god have mercy on the rest of the world’s souls.

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Beer League Hero, Edmonton Oilers, Michael Sifeldeen, NHL, Podcast, Prospects, Rumors, Trades

BLH Podcast 9/7/16: What Was Offered for Merrill and Gelinas?

Michael Sifeldeen and I (BLH) sat down for a good 90 minutes yesterday and pounded out a very casual BLH podcast. It was Mike’s first time and I hadn’t done one for ages but it was good to get back on the horse and we covered a ton of Edmonton Oilers material including:

  • The Larsson trade and why it was necessary for the Oilers to make it.
  • How we thought the entry draft was going to go down for the Oilers.
  • Why is Milan Lucic a much better fit for the Oilers than Taylor Hall.
  • Griffin Reinhart, should the Oilers keep him or move on?
  • The World Cup
  • Who the Oilers supposedly offered for Jon Merrill and Eric Gelinas before they landed on Adam Larsson.
  • Is Whyte Ave. more or less stabby than ten years ago?

Take a listen below and please subscribe if you’d like to hear more from us. It’s being hosted on Soundcloud at the moment and so options are a bit limited to using the SoundCloud app or the website interface. Our apologies, we’ll try to have that sorted ASAP!

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @beerleagueheroe and @sife.

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Edmonton Oilers, International, Michael Sifeldeen, NHL

Hall Passed

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This is going to be a short article. But there are some things I’ve been wanting to say to Edmonton’s faithful who are still on the “boo hoo how could we trade Taylor Hall” bandwagon, and this is an appropriate enough time as any.

May 27th, 2016

Team Canada’s World Cup of Hockey roster is fully announced. The initial roster announcement weeks before was notoriously Taylor-less, as he had just made his presence felt in a great IIHF World Championship tourney, and everyone and their dog was expecting to see that big #4 show up on the finalized full player list sooner rather than later. Well, May 27th came and went, and Team Canada was still without, what some people thought and still think, is one of the NHL’s top-3 left wingers.

Now, at that time, we could’ve argued that he was missing simply because the coaching staff made a conscious and strategic decision to load up the forward lines with centres, and yes, at that point in time, there is validity to that.

July 16, 2016

Rumours abound that Jamie Benn, having undergone surgery to repair a core muscle injury this offseason in July, may not be able to participate as planned as Team Canada’s top left winger. Who better to replace him than one of the NHL’s other high-scoring left wingers than… Taylor Hall?! The very same Taylor Hall so heartlessly and thoughtlessly spurned from the initial Canadian roster.

August 23, 2016

Logan Couture is named to Team Canada as replacement for Jamie Benn. Christ almighty, the sky is falling in Taylor Hall Apologist land. How stupid could Mike Babcock and Doug Armstrong be to just forget that Taylor Hall is ripe for the picking for that #1 LW spot? Are these guys even paying attention? Do they even hockey, bro? Forget for a moment that Logan Couture, just a couple months prior, scored 10 goals and 30 thoroughly convincing points in a Western Conference Championship run with the Sharks, Edmonton’s twittersphere cannot fathom how New Jersey Devils legend Taylor Hall wasn’t on speed dial as soon as Benn became a question mark.

September 2, 2016

Los Angeles Kings forward Jeff Carter is ruled out of contention for Team Canada following the announcement that he had suffered a lower-body injury during offseason training. (Boy oh boy, with all these inexplicable injuries plaguing the World Cup teams, I’m starting to think everyone forgot the All Star Game weekend isn’t until February…) Regardless, surely now is the time the Canadian management team realizes where they left Taylor’s number and fires him off a text at the very least inviting him to camp at the start of next week… Oops, Corey Perry is announced the same day as Carter’s last-minute replacement. What has Corey Perry ever done for a Canadian international squad, anyway? Idiots!

Present Day

Shock and disbelief is still palpable in the tweets and Facebook comments of Oilers and Devils fans. But it shouldn’t be. The lame excuses of “Well, Armstrong just has some kind of vendetta against Hall”, or “Babcock only wants centres” are overplayed and irrelevant at this point. There were four opportunities for Taylor Hall to be named to the team, and five times he was passed over for other players. Edmonton has in the past, and to this day continues to overvalue him and overlook the obvious flaws in his play. (We’re not getting into this shit again about the truth or falsehood of the claims about his off-ice behaviour.)

We aren’t better coaches than Mike Babcock. We aren’t better at crafting teams than Doug Armstrong. There is a general opinion amongst the professionals in this league about how Taylor Hall plays hockey, and it isn’t as good as Edmonton’s media and social media commentators want to recall it was.

Sorry.

Follow me and tell me what a dummy you think I am on Twitter at @sife

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Armchair GM, Edmonton Oilers, Michael Sifeldeen, NHL

I’ve Got a Burnsing Desire

Allow me to start off with a preamble here: I love Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. I think he’s one of the best and most underrated two-way centers in the entire league. He’s a great kid. Keeps his head down, does his job, does work around the community, and is just generally a likable guy. I’d be gutted if we lost him.

THAT SAID…

What if he doesn’t have a breakout season here in 2016-17? That’s not to say as if he’s necessarily been “under-performing” in his first five seasons in the league. But you can’t say he hasn’t been a little… soft. Last year he dropped 27 games due to a broken finger, and he’s missed 44 total games in his career thus far. The more worrying thing is that he suffered in 2012-13 from the classic 21st century Oilers ailment known as “Shitty Shoulderitis”, and has already had it worked on a couple of times so far in his young career.

Now, this isn’t to say that he’s a broken man and a lost cause, it’s just a general comment on the physical aspect of his game: it just really isn’t there. Sweet baby Nuge doesn’t take sustained punishment by the NHL goon squad too well. Thankfully, he’s a smart kid, and is gifted with incredibly high hockey IQ, so he doesn’t necessarily need to play the toughest game out there. His intelligence on the ice gets him to where he needs to be and generally keeps him out of where he shouldn’t be. Generally.

I still can’t help but think that, as much as I like the guy, if a certain German stud steps up big time and shows he’s ready to sidle up into the 2C spot behind #97, and maybe a guy like Drake Caggiula ends up proving he can anchor a bottom-6… Well then that’s where things could get interesting.

THE TRADE

Here’s how I see it going down. We’ll have to wait for the 16-17 season to play itself out fully, see who gets moved where, who doesn’t live up to the hype here and there, but I see Edmonton shopping out Nuge to a team who needs a solid, 50-point, two-way center who can drive plays and collapse effectively when those plays don’t always work out. (Who couldn’t use that, right?) But specifically, a team like Minny or Columbus. Call me a cynic, but I just can’t see Pierre-Luc Dubois being the savior for that team. By the end of this season, RNH is still locked into a very reasonable $6M contract for another 4 whole years. That is a tasty deal for a long time, something a team on the receiving end of his skill set can build around.

I see us getting at least a 2nd round pick + top-4 d-man or top-9 forward or prospect out of an RNH trade, but that doesn’t matter so much when we look at…

THE TAKE

Literally the most normal photo I could find of this animal

Brent Burns. I want him. And not just for his ridiculous facial hair or ASG breakaway showmanship. He’s just so goddamn good. And as a 6’5″, 230-pound, right shot offensive defenceman, he’s exactly the type of hockey player that Peter Chiarelli is having exquisitely deviant dreams about right now.

Burns put up 27 goals and 48 assists (75P!!) in a full 82-game campaign last year. His boxcars read like this for his career so far: 797GP-141G-282A-423TP. He’s +3 in RelCorsiFor% averaged for his career. His playmaking is elite with a FirstA/60 rate of 0.53. He’s a giant goon and is a nightmare to play against because he’s so offensively strong while simultaneously being huge and very difficult to break past for opposing offensive players. He’s just so goddamn good.

He’s also coming into free agency at the end of this season. And his contract expiry is such that not only does San Jose not have to resign him before the dreaded expansion draft rolls around, he also doesn’t need to be protected from the clutches/talons/swords of the Las Vegas BlackJackKnightBirds or whatever they’re called this week. To me, this is a perfect storm for Burns to be testing the waters and seeing what a new team might be willing to give him to essentially cap off his fine career.

THE DEAL

Right now, Burnsy makes $5.76/per. A very respectable deal, no doubt. He’ll want more. So if the Oilers just so happen to find themselves, oh, I dunno, ~$6 million dollars richer by the end of next season, what can we reasonably offer Brent Burns that would convince him to pack his bags and head up to E-town?

Well, he’ll be 32 by the time this move is even viable. So I don’t see us wanting to offer him anything over 6 years. He’ll probably want to pull a Weber and be playing (“playing”) into his 40s, but it won’t happen. GMs are way too leery about those deals with defenceman nowadays, considering the fact that Arizona Coyotes legend Chris Pronger is still technically an NHLer. I think Burns will ask for 8, we’ll counter with 5, and ultimately settle on 6 years at something between $7.5-$8M. A huge contract, no doubt. But ultimately a workable one when you consider that we just made $4.5M more dollars by shockingly not resigning Nikita Nikitin, and we’re going to find another $3.25M when Andrew Ference’s contract goes away at the end of this season.

We also have our magical, high-profile player-accumulating tool known as Connor McDavid, and let’s not forget that Burns played for years with Todd McLennan behind him on the bench, and you’ve got to think that if the combo of McD + Chia gets us Looch, McD + MacT could get us Burns…

Anyway, keep in mind here that while San Jose is struggling to say the least with cap space, they are on the verge of losing Thornton and Marleau and their accompanying cumulative $13.4M to unrestricted free agency next season as well. So you never know, maybe they’ll throw the cheque book at Burns and tell him to write in a number he likes. Or, maybe they’re going to clear house and start from scratch. I know I’m sure hoping it’s the latter. Sorry, Nuge.

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Edmonton Oilers, Michael Sifeldeen, NHL, NHL Entry Draft, Prospects

Hedge Your Bets on Benson

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I’m typing this article up on a combination of an iPad Air 2 + Apple Magic Keyboard 2. It’s replacing my very-powerful-yet-very-old-and-temperamental Macbook Pro that I picked up sometime in 2010. It’s a great computer and all, but more often than not it’s a headache to use, it doesn’t show up for me every day, and basically I just needed something new, different, more reliable. Maybe the iPad doesn’t have the same kind of raw computing power as my old Mac, but it is also without the old, buggy software and backlog of files slowing it down every time I need to count on it.

Which is, of course, an absolutely perfect metaphor for who we’re going to be talking about today: Tyler Benson. I’m going all in here, and I’m predicting that Tyler Benson is going to grow into the perfect left wing replacement for Taylor Hall. It might not be this season or the next, but wait and see. By his early 20s, Benson is going to be an absolute force in the NHL, and he’ll be tearing it up on the left side in a very Hall-like fashion, but (hopefully) without all the other bullshit getting in the way of otherwise remarkable performances.

BACKGROUND

The Edmonton Oilers picked up a really interesting player in the 2016 NHL Entry Draft in Tyler Benson. He’s an Edmonton boy, and a minor celebrity coming out of the South Side Athletic Club following his just absurd numbers put up in AAA with the Lions Bantam team. Touted by some analysts in the early 2010s to be the “Next One” out of Western Canada, how did such a shining prospect fall into the Oilers’ laps 32nd overall in the 2nd round?

In a word: injuries.

The kid was an absolute monster in AAA. Like, as in, “numbers no one had ever seen before.” He scored 146 points (57G, 89A) in 33 (33!) games in 2013 for the SSAC Lions. Can you just imagine for a second what scoring almost 4 1/2 points per game must feel like? Absurd. And according to an Edmonton-based /r/hockey redditor familiar with his junior league play, Benson’s bantam coach — in an apparent show of mercy and good sportsmanship (but mostly mercy) — would often bench him for much of the 3rd periods of his games when the scores just got out of hand. So really, his point totals should’ve been even higher than the already-terrifying numbers he put up playing only 2/3 of his normal shifts.

But last winter, after being drafted first overall into the WHL for the 2014-15 season and putting up a very good showing (62GP-14G-26A-40TP), his 2015-16 campaign was cut short to only 30 games when he had to have surgery to remove a cyst from his back. In a stroke of horribly bad fortune, Tyler then developed a groin/lower core issue called osteitis pubis, which is a disorder that kids get from working out too much and too hard.

BEYOND BOXCARS

Boxcars are good and all, but with the absence of advanced stats in the minor leagues, how does Benson really “play the game” outside of putting up just a whacky amount of points, and why do I think he’ll be a perfect Taylor Hall replacement if he gets back and keeps his health?

Steve Kournianos has this to say about the Vancouver Giants captain:

“He is a nightmare to defend because he is as physically punishing with the puck as he is without it… Benson is very shifty with tremendous balance, meaning he can continue to move if he gets hit at the same time he decides to change direction. Possessing the kind of vision and IQ he owns makes it no surprise the CHL came close to giving him “exceptional” status to play a full season as a 15 year old (cut short by a knee injury).”

He’s not a small guy at 6′ and 200lbs, and if his scouting reports are to be believed, he’s steady and stable with and without the puck, and can be a real force at both ends of the ice. He’s sure-footed, and the word “complete” gets used time and time again when referring to the guy. Say what you want about Taylor Hall, but to my eyes and ears, we were never seeing or hearing those things said about him. Hall simply isn’t a defensively-minded forward, and despite his elite foot speed, almost every game he was over-skating pucks and slipping on the ice at inopportune times. Flame away in the comments section, guys, but I’m just sayin’…

SUMMARY

Chiarelli says Benson’s hockey sense is “through the roof”, and the reports out of orientation camp in Jasper this year have him looking and feeling healthy. The Oilers organization has a real gem with former Olympic gold medal-winning figure skater David Pelletier as their skating coach, and I have no doubt that he and the other coaches in the system will be working closely with Benson to ensure that he maintains his health in a sustainable way.

The irony here is that, had Tyler been fully healthy for his last season in the W, there’s no chance the Oilers get to pick him up at #32. The same Draft Analyst article by Kournianos has him being compared with the likes of Auston Matthews with regard to his on-the-spot corrections and his ability to create offense in ostensibly impossible situations, for Christ’s sake. I, for one, am right chuffed on Tyler Benson, and I look forward to having this article cited about four years from now when he’s considered an elite NHL winger and I get to say “I told you so!”

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