Edmonton Oilers Talk: Savoie and Petrov’s Dream Season Debuts and Are the Oilers a Cup Contender This Year?

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Cult of Hockey

Dare to dream? That challenge is being taken up big time with Edmonton Oilers

Top 10 reasons why the Oilers can win the Cup:

Connor McDavid is the game’s best player and is looking like he’s ready to own the NHL, to dominate two-way play.
Leon Draisaitl is the game’s second or third best player and can be a two-way monster in the playoffs.
Mike Smith had a great year in 2020-21. Mikko Koskinen had a good year in 2019-20. Between them, one of them is likely to step up and provide solid goaltending.
Darnell Nurse has stepped up as a true No. 1 d-man in the NHL, taking over where Sekera and Klefbom left off.
Edmonton will miss Larsson’s shut-down defence, but they have the best group of puck movers on the squad since 2005-06, with Tyson Barrie, Evan Bouchard and Duncan Keith all strong passers, Nurse a strong transporter of the puck, and Cody Ceci and Slater Koekkoek able to rip a decent pass.
The team has some experienced veteran leaders in Keith, Smith, Kris Russell, Derek Ryan, plus a large group of able-to-excellent vets in the prime of their careers, McDavid, Draisaitl, Nurse, Zach Hyman, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jesse Puljujarvi, Warren Foegele, Kailer Yamamoto, Ceci, Koekkoek.
The team should have strong secondary scoring from players like Hyman, Nugent-Hopkins, Barrie, Bouchard, Puljujarvi, Foegele and Yamamoto.
Edmonton’s best players aren’t just excellent, they’re big, fast and tough, starting with McDavid, Draisaitl and Nurse.
If Edmonton needs reinforcement this year, there are a few prospects who might step up and provide a boost by the end of the year, including Dylan Holloway, Raphael Lavoie, Philip Broberg, Stuart Skinner, Ilya Konovalov, and Filip Berglund.
Edmonton’s coaching staff of Dave Tippett, Jim Playfair and Glen Gulutzan is sharp and experienced. They don’t get everything right, but they get a lot right.

BLH’s Thoughts: That’s a fine list of pros for Edmonton’s Stanley Cup chances, but somehere down the line something is going to go wrong and that’s when you need a bit of luck. The question is, what’s most likely to go wrong?

Something Staples didn’t mention is that the Oilers are going to have an ELITE powerplay this year and I think their PK is going to be amongst the best in the league. You take both of those into the post-season with some above average goaltending and dominant 5v5 scoring and you’ve got yourselves a team that can do some damage.

What I’d truly like to know is if somebody could write ten reasons why the Oilers won’t win the Stanley Cup and how many of those reasons could you come up with if you weren’t allowed to use injuries in any of them? I say that because it comes up every year, of course any team would suffer if their best player got hurt.

Carter Savoie picks up where he left off last season, scoring the first goal of the year for the Pios at 10:38.

Bobby Brink & Justin Lee with the helpers.

DU & ASU all knotted at 1-1. pic.twitter.com/FbVwC9TeoF

— Denver Hockey (@DU_Hockey) October 9, 2021

The Athletic

Lowetide: Oilers prospects thrive as junior, college and European seasons begin

In his first OHL game, playing for the North Bay Battalion, Petrov scored three goals on eight shots in a dominant performance. He scored again the following night and now has four goals in two games for the season.
2020 fourth-round pick Carter Savoie unleashed an impressive debut for the Denver Pioneers (NCHC) as college hockey ratchets up to full impact this weekend. Savoie delivered the first goal of the season for Denver and added two assists later in the game.
Maxim Berezkin is the most promising of the young men playing in Europe this season… The MHL is the top Russian junior league, so his early numbers (2gp 2g 1a 3pts) shouldn’t be a surprise considering the big winger has played 11 KHL games. Berezkin has zero points and just six shots on goal and is averaging just under seven minutes a night.
Jeremias Lindewall (5gp 2g 2a 4pts) has four games in the Allsvenskan… Though he hasn’t delivered any points, Lindewall won’t turn 20 until January and has shown offensive ability at lower levels.
Maxim Denezhkin (11gp 2g 6a 8pts) plays in the VHL, sometimes known as the Supreme Hockey League… Denezhkin scored 22 points in 34 games in the VHL a year ago and is on a higher trajectory this season.
Patrik Siikanen (10gp 3g 2a 5pts) is something of an afterthought on the Oilers’ prospect list, mostly because his offence was nonexistent at the higher levels until this season.

BLH’s Thoughts: Edmonton sure has some dangerous offensive players coming through their system eh? To say it’s been a while is a slight understatement, moreover, I’m intrigued by the amount of Russians in the pipeline. That’s a narrative I’d like to see changed in the coming years.

Lindewall and Siikanen are coming out of left-field a bit. Another couple of names to keep an eye out for are Tomas Mizura who’s playing in the NCAA this year for Providence as well as Filip Engaras, a RW also plying his trade in the NCAA for New Hampshire.

https://twitter.com/CZprospects/status/1447086650073432067

The Daily Goal Horn

The Calgary Flames reportedly went after (Jack) Eichel hard during the summer, but like all other teams eventually backed off. Could they be the under the radar team that gets this deal done?
On a recent appearance on The Jeff Marek Show, Elliotte Friedman revealed that the Calgary Flames tried hard to acquire Eichel in the offseason. He also added that Eichel never said he wouldn’t want to play there.
According to Andy Strickland of the Cam and Strick Podcast: “In a nutshell here it is, the Tkachuk’s want a bridge deal and Ottawa does not want to sign (Brady) Tkachuk to a bridge deal. They want to do a 7 or 8 year deal and Brady Tkachuk doesn’t want to.”
TSN’s Insider Darren Dreger said on a radio spot for TSN1050 that this stalemate has Sens ownership in a predicament. If they give Brady a 3 year bridge deal, they may as well go 4 years and send him to UFA status, which they don’t want to do. He then said trade speculation is about to begin.