Tag Archives: Oscar Klefbom

Armchair GM, Breaking News, Edmonton Oilers, NHL, Prospects, Rob Cooke, Rumors

NHL expansion bids are in. How does it affect the Oilers?

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It was made official by the NHL that there was two official bids for expansion franchises filed yesterday. All paperwork along with a 10 million dollar deposit had to be received by the head office at the end of business yesterday. According to the official NHL press release this morning there was significant interest with 16 applications being given out be league. However, only two potential ownership groups managed to meet all the criteria in the short time allotted. This is the official release from the league this morning.

Is it just me or does this come across as kind of arrogant and condescending? Imagine that, people can’t pull magical arena deals out of their hats. Two weeks in my opinion was a farce to begin with. Had the time frame been doubled or more I think we would have seen more bids submitted. Seattle seemed to depend on an arena deal that couldn’t materialize in time so it didn’t happen. In case you didn’t read the press release or are still unsure after doing so, the two bids were submitted by Quebecor and Bill Foley. So that obviously means the return of the Quebec Nordiques and an as of yet to be named to team in Las Vegas. Both cities are well on their way to having their arenas built with Las Vegas already starting a season ticket drive to gauge interest. That drive was going exceptionally well with well over 10000 seats sold the last time that I had checked.

That is all well and good to know that there will be two more NHL franchises in the league hopefully for the 2017-18 season, but what does it mean for the Oilers? Well for starters it will require another league realignment. I can’t see the NHL adding Quebec to the eastern conference without a team coming to the west in addition to the Las Vegas franchise. It doesn’t make sense to have a 32-team league divided unevenly. Jonathon Willis wrote an interesting piece yesterday regarding realignment and he suggested 8 divisions with 4 teams in each. Here is a link to the full article. For our purposes here is what his potential realignment would look like.

WESTERN TEAMS
NORTH PACIFIC: Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Winnipeg                                CANADA EAST: Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City
SOUTH CENTRAL: Arizona, St. Louis, Colorado, and Dallas
SOUTH PACIFIC: Los Angeles, San Jose, Anaheim, and Las Vegas

EASTERN TEAMS 
NORTH CENTRAL: Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota, and Columbus
NORTH ATLANTIC: Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington
UNITED STATES EAST: Boston, New Jersey, Islanders, and Rangers
SOUTH ATLANTIC: Tampa Bay, Carolina, Florida, and Nashville

While I really like the idea I don’t see the league moving to this format. Instead opting to go with four 8 team divisions. That would likely mean that the Las Vegas team would join the Pacific and Columbus would join the Central in the west. Quebec would possible join the Atlantic but that would mean that another team would be forced to move to the Metro division with Boston being the most likely in my opinion. So if that is the realignment that the league chooses it does add two more teams to the west, evening out the conferences and making the west just a little more competitive with the addition of the Blue Jackets.

The other way that the Edmonton franchise will be affected by the expansion process is through the inevitable expansion draft. Teams will only be allowed to protect a certain amount of players on their roster at the time and the rest will be up for the taking by either Quebec or Las Vegas. The NHL hasn’t set the rules for how many players at each position they will be able to protect so for my purposes I will go off of the rules that were used in the 2000 expansion.

There were two possibilities for how many players a team can protect. The first version allows a team to protect 1 goalie, 5 defensemen, and 9 forwards. The second would see a team select 2 goalies, 3 defenders, and 7 forwards. Under the requirements set out in the 2000 expansion draft there was no eligibility requirements for a team opting to protect only one masked man. If a team chose to protect two however, then said team had to ensure that each protected goalie had player in 10 games the previous season, with 31 minutes of ice time being needed to e considered a game played. If ten games were not played in the previous season the other eligibility criteria is 25 games over the two previous seasons. Next rule is that every team has to have one defenseman unprotected that played a minimum of 40 games the previous year or 70 total over the past two seasons. There is also the same eligibility requirements for the forwards with at least two needing to meet the same criteria as the defenseman.

If you area asking yourself why the game limits set on players that are being unprotected it is to ensure that any expansion franchise will have the opportunity to receive players that will have some semblance of NHL experience. Now I am not saying that Edmonton is going to leave Jordan Eberle unprotected just because he will meet the 40-game eligibility requirement. That is just ridiculous and all of Edmonton management would likely be strung up outside the new arena if that ever happens. People need to be rational, calm, and logical when trying to come up with a list of players to protect on the team. There was a discussion of the writers last night about this same thing and we all agreed that analytics will play a huge role for the two teams that will potentially be joining the league.

To me selecting the players that Edmonton will protect shouldn’t be overly difficult because we have our clear-cut core players and those that aren’t. If you are not a core player at this point you will likely be expendable in the upcoming expansion draft. I realize that the draft won’t happen for at least a year but more likely two, with it occurring sometime between the Stanley Cup finals and the 2017 entry draft, but for our purposes here today we will base our picks off of the current roster as it sits. So let’s get right to it and expel some reasonably useful NHL players and a whole lot of players that are not.

First off, if the draft were to happen today I would have a very hard time not selecting option A. That would be 1 goalie, 5 defenders, and 9 forwards, There is just too much talent on the team to opt for a second goalie, there by giving up two defenders and two forwards. If I had to make the selections for the team my list would look like this:

Goaltender(1): Cam Talbot

Defensemen(5): Andrej Sekera, Mark Fayne, Oscar Klefbom, Darnell Nurse, and Griffin Reinhart.

Forwards(9): Connor McDavid, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle, Benoit Pouliot, Nail Yakupov, Leon Draisaitl, Anton Lander, Bogdan Yakimov, Greg Chase, and Matt Hendricks.

From my list you can tell the players that I value above all else. Thankfully there is no minimum amount of games played to allow for a player to be protected. Also with the  players left there are more than a couple of options for filling the league requirements of games played. On defense with Nikita Nikitin and Andrew Ference we have two players that played in excess of forty games last year. No one said they had to play well, just that they had to play. In the forwards group we have Teddy Purcell that has been a consistent player over his career and would be a good addition to a new franchise. Along with the Teddy Bear we have Lauri Korpikoski, Mark Letestu, and Rob Klinkhammer also unprotected that would fit under one of the two eligibility criteria.

We must not forget that just because certain players are unprotected doesn’t necessarily mean that the player will even be selected. I doubt there is much of a market for Nikitin and his outrageous salary. There would likely be about the same amount of interest or even a little less in an aging Andrew Ference with two years left and a full no-movement clause to boot. The forwards would garner more interest as all the players left available are either actual NHL players or are a reasonable facsimile thereof. Of the nine forwards that I chose to protect the only two that I can see a case being made for someone else on are Bogdan Yakimov and Greg Chase. The others are all key players on the roster, including Matt Hendricks. Hendy might not be a star player, a la Taylor Hall or Connor McDavid,but he plays an integral part of this team and his leadership skills can’t be discounted. Players like Draisaitl, Nurse, and Reinhart are big parts of the future of this franchise and they deserve to be treated as such. Some may say that they would rather keep Davidson or Schultz but to me Reinhart will be the better player in the long-term.

Anyone have any issues with the players I have selected? Have a completely different list? Let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree. Hit me up on Twitter too, @cooke_rob and we can talk some puck. Thanks for reading and remember to check out the as always excellent Beer League Heroes T-shirt Shop for all your T-shirt needs. The shirt shop is here, if you are interested in checking out the great designs that are currently offered by the website. Stay tuned for the launch of the official Cooke’s Shirt Shack in the very near future as well! It will be the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas, like the coolest of the cool! Like , fer sure! Thanks for coming out Beer Leaguers!!!

AMENDMENT: I apologize to all the readers but I was mistaken in the rules the expansion draft. I missed the rules regarding younger players. First and second year professional players will not require protection as they are exempt from being selected. By this rule it would take McDavid, Draisaitl, Nurse, Reinhart, Yakimov, and Chase would be exempt from being selected.

With these stipulations I would obviously change my selections. No need to protect players that are exempt from being selected in the first place. Again I apologize for my error and appreciate those that pointed it out to me. Below are my new selections based on this new information.

Goalies(2): Cam Talbot and Ben Scrivens

Defense(3): Andrej Sekera, Mark Fayne, and Oscar Klefbom

Forwards(7): Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Nail Yakupov, Benoit Pouliot, Matt Hendricks, Anton Lander

I only chose to protect Scrivens because I didn’t feel there was 5 defensemen or 9 forwards that I would want to protect. I would have opted to keep Brossoit instead of Scrivens but he doesn’t meet the games played eligibility to be protected. Thanks again for reading and again I apologize for my error.  

Cheers

Rob

Armchair GM, Edmonton Oilers, NHL, Rob Cooke, Rumors

WELCOME TO THE MAD HOUSE, an Oilers blog

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Well here we sit on Sunday morning and it is a real slow news day for the Edmonton Oilers. So slow in fact that I have decided to debut my new weekly series. Welcome to the madhouse will be a point-form style blog that will not only cover Oilers news but really anything that I feel like commenting at the time. So fair warning people, if you want to read an article solely about hockey this one may not be for you from time to time. Today you are in luck though because I have a lot going on inside the old hat rack that I want to touch on. So let’s get right to it, enter if you dare.

  • The NHL has agreed to try three-on-three overtime format this season and I have seen a lot of good things being written about it. I mean come on, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that by going to this new format we will some really fast hockey. Teams with a lot of speed up front will be looking to push the pace will the bigger stronger teams struggle to keep them to the outside. I for one am stoked to see the Oilers playing three-on-three as we have a bevy of speedy players up front and potentially on the back-end as well. Can you imagine Hall and McDavid flying down the ice with that much room to move? Like I said, the majority of feedback that I have seen is positive but one goalie has remarked that he thinks that it will be harder on the net-minders. Cory Schneider had this to say when discussing the new format. Not exactly a ringing endorsement but a scathing review either. Check out his comments at the end of the post about goalie skill levels and making nets larger to bring out more skill. Interesting hearing that coming from a goalie.

 

  • All Edmonton Oilers fans know there is a great big elephant in the room this morning. That beloved pachyderm is present courtesy of the second buy-out window granted to the franchise for filing the Schultz arbitration. I wrote a piece late last week discussing the merits and pitfalls of using said buy-out and I am still on record as being in favour of using it. If the space can be freed to sign Cody Franson or Christian Ehrhoff for 3 years I say do it. There is a lot of space coming available next summer with both Ben Scrivens and Teddy Purcell coming off the books next year so I say do it! Fortune favours the bold! Or at least that is what we are told, we have never seen the bold we were so falsely promised… The only key RFA’s next summer are Oscar Klefbom and Justin Schultz with Schultz being moved if Franson signs. We have no need of Schultz if we have a better version of the player here.

 

  • What would the addition of a player like Franson do to players like Nurse? Adding Franson pushes everyone but possibly Sekera and Fayne down the depth chart. The addition of a player of that caliber would mean that both Griffin Reinhart and Darnell Nurse start the season in Bakersfield and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Nurse has a grand total of six games as pro and Reinhart, while having a full season of AHL experience, still has only eight NHL games on his resume. Just because they are very highly touted prospects doesn’t mean they will be gifted roster spots like in years past. New management seems more than capable of separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak. I think that regardless of who the players are the seven or eight best will be on the opening night roster. Not just the most expensive…

 

  • Talking about Darnell Nurse, just how crazy good is this kid? He has the ability, size, mean streak, and speed to be the real number one defender that we so desperately need. Of course that is the best case scenario and even if it does come to fruition it won’t be for a few years yet as Darnell progresses as a player. At this point I think the worst case is a second pairing player but I just see too much skill and too many natural physical gifts to not be at least a top pairing guy.

 

  • Monday, besides being the end of the Oilers 48 hour buy-out window, is the deadline for official submitting an expansion bid. Originally it was thought that we would see bids coming from Las Vegas, Quebec City, and Seattle. It came to light Friday that the possible ownership group in Seattle would not be submitting a bid after arena issues were not able to be worked out in time. There is talk of second bid coming from the Seattle area but it is uncertain whether the league will be keen to be outside of the greater Seattle or if they will refuse the $500 million franchise fee that is expected from each new team. It does however seem all but a certainty that Quebecor media will be handing their bid in along with the $10 million deposit. And with Las Vegas proceeding with the building of a fantastic new arena complex it is a virtual guarantee that the prospective owners have all their forms filled out and a giant suitcase full of money to wheel into NHL headquarters tomorrow morning.

 

  • I was on Twitter last night and our very own Beer League Hero brought up the polarizing discussion of the Big E. Of course I mean Eric Lindros. One of the most physically dominant skilled players I have ever had the opportunity to watch. BLH asked if, and I am paraphrasing of course, we will ever see a player like Lindros again? It is a great topic for discussion as there was no one like him ever before he joined the league and hasn’t been anyone like him since. He has made many errors along the way. From his refusal to join the Nordiques to his off-ice issues that have been well documented. I am not going to condone his actions as there is no reason for what took place to ever happen but I am thinking that those items need to be separated when discussing him as a hockey player. If we are talking about what he is like as a person then by all means bring on the character attacks and prior misdeeds but in a discussion about him as a player shouldn’t revolve around what he did in a night club 20 plus years ago. Just my opinion.

 

  • Will the summer of insanity ever end for the Boston Bruins and general manager Don Sweeney? He traded one of the top up and coming defenseman in the entire league in Dougie Hamilton for next to nothing in return. He had a better offer, although marginally, from former Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli but had to add in an extra player on top in an attempt to stick it to our Chia pet. Then he moved power forward Milan Lucic to the Los Angeles Kings for promising young goalie Martin Jones and the 13th overall pick in the 2015 draft. The pick was used to select Jakub Zboril, a defender for the Saint Johns Sea Dogs of the QMJHL. I know nothing about this young fella so I won’t make any judgement as far as whether he is a good pick at that point of the draft. I do understand Boston adding defense at the draft though. Likely an attempt to find a replacement for Hamilton but that isn’t coming any time soon. Beleskey was an okay add for the team and was even kept below 4 million per which is well below what he was asking. Overall I don’t know that either of the two trades they made were any good. The Hamilton trade will take years to decide on but it is a clear win for Calgary right now. The Lucic trade was one I liked but personally I think the guy is over-rated to begin with, The point of all of this is that Boston subtracted one of the best defensemen they had and didn’t bring anyone that can be considered close to a replacement. Sweeney is on record as saying that his team may not be doing adding yet. With the expectation being a playoff berth next year they damn sure better not be done. This team is worse than they were prior to the NHL draft that is for sure.

 

  • The final thing that I want to touch on is the fabulous t-shirts that Beer League Heroes is currently selling through our store. There are some fantastic designs and let’s not forget the always stylish Beer League Heroes shirt! Get yours before  they are gone!!! Besides being a great deal they are also great at helping meet women! The conversations these beauties will inspire will be the stuff of legend! No but seriously they won’t help your game at all. If you had none before the shirt like me you still won’t have any after you wear it. But at least you will have a really snappy new shirt!

I have decided that I will end this weekly blog series every week with a question to pose to all you fantastic readers and I will post the best answers in the following weeks edition. Today my question to all of you is what should the entrance song be for the Edmonton Oilers this season? My answer is in the video below. Thanks for reading, leave me a comment and follow me on twitter, @cooke_rob. Have a great night!

 

Cheers

Rob

 

Armchair GM, Edmonton Oilers, NHL, Rob Cooke

Are the Edmonton Oilers Playoff Contenders Now?

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     There is an enormous amount of talk on the Twittersphere right now about the Oilers attempting to negotiate a trade with the Chicago Blackhawks to land defensive stalwart Brent Seabrook. All that talk got me to thinking about what is realistic for the Oilers moving forward. I agree that adding Seabrook would be a tremendous boost and would make the team a playoff contender next season. But with that being said, I still don’t see Seabrook being moved. Although I can honestly say I didn’t think that Saad would be moved either. He would be a tremendous add to the team but that would be a best case scenario. While I would love to see him play in the blue and orange I just don’t see it as being realistic at this point.

That is my topic for the day, what is realistic going forward? I read a blog this morning from Richard Cloutier over at PrettySkateMachine and it got me to thinking about what fans should expect this coming season. If you want to read the post it is here. Now before I begin to discuss the post I need to make it perfectly clear that I DO NOT dislike Richard in any way. I respect his opinion and someday hope to be as widely followed as him. Truth be told, Richard is a big reason that I got into blogging in the first place. So if you hate my writing or whatever please direct all complaints to him. But in all seriousness, Richard and I don’t have any animosity between us and even though we rarely agree, we respect each others opinions and enjoy discussing the team. I read the post mentioned above and I agreed with virtually everything that he wrote in the piece with the exception being that the Oilers will be a playoff team in 2015-16.

I do think that the team will take an astronomical step forward this season but there are still far too many variables that need to break right in order for this team to see the second season. The Oilers were 35 points out of playoffs last season. Yes you read that right, 35 points! That is a huge number of points to make up in one season. While the Oilers got better this summer, dramatically better in fact, so did a lot of teams in the Western conference. To assume that the additions we made is enough is putting the cart before the horse in my opinion. Of course if the Oilers get the puck luck that the Flames had last season it is entirely possible but not probable. So what needs to happen for this much maligned franchise to see the post-season for the first time in a decade? A whole lot actually.

Cam Talbot has to be the bona fide starter that the team expects him to be, we cannot afford to have another goaltender issue like we have in the past couple of seasons. Talbot has to be able to steal games for this team and keep them in the games that they have no business being in. On top of that he is going to need to be able to handle the 60 plus game workload normally associated with being a true starting goalie. That is a ton of pressure to put on a guy that has played less than a hundred games in the NHL. Is he ready for it? I guess we will know in the coming months.

What else needs to happen? Well we need Andrej Sekera to play huge minutes for us on the top pairing and this season and do it well. Is he capable of it? Possibly but he is definitely better suited to be the number three defender on the . The unfortunate thing here is that the Oilers are again going to be forced to play the defense above their heads as we don’t have the real top pairing guys, a la Drew Doughty or Duncan Keith and we won’t see one coming this year either. That was a large part of the issue last season. All the defencemen were playing over their ability level and that is something that the good teams never do.

To me those are the two biggest factors moving forward this season. The goaltending needs to be much much better and the defense needs to be less chaotic and more efficient at moving the puck out of our zone. If both of those items break in the Oilers favor we could see hockey in late April again.

Now that I have framed the issue at hand lets look at what we know so far. We know that our star players will be our stars again. Hall, Nugent-Hopkins, and Eberle are all a year older and capable of handling the tougher competition. Benoit Pouliot, Nail Yakupov, Teddy Purcell, and Lauri Korpikoski will fill out the top nine wingers positions adequately if not spectacularly. Lander looks extremely capable of handling the third line center spot and chip in offensively on a consistent basis. The fourth line players like Mark Letestu, Matt Hendricks, and Rob Klinkhammer will be counted on to be sound defensively and little else. We also know that Oscar Klefbom is capable of playing top four minutes this year without quite as easy zone starts, depending on his partner. Dragging Schultz around again this year will virtually guarantee massive offensive zone starts if for no other reason than Schultz is a train wreck in the defensive zone. At this point barring other players joining the roster before training camp in September that is about all we can count on being true.

Of course I am leaving out the phenom and future league superstar Connor McDavid. The reason I am leaving him out for now is we don’t know just how well he will do this season. I fully expect him to be a finalist for the Calder trophy, but since the league seems to hate awarding trophies to Edmonton Oilers players, he will be runner-up to Jack Eichel from Buffalo. McDavid’s numbers will depend a lot on Todd McLellan and how much he decides to play the youngster. Richard states in his article that he feels that Connor could challenge for the Art Ross this season and depending on his minutes and zone starts it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. That would obviously be the best case scenario but it isn’t entirely unrealistic.

We know what we have so far and who can be counted on to be effective and consistent players moving forward. I am not going to get into exactly where I see the players finishing point wise as that would take away from future posts that I plan to write this summer. What I do want to look at is where I predict the Oilers will finish in the standings this season. Unlike Richard I don’t see Edmonton being quite there yet. To get into the playoffs last season in the west you needed a minimum of 97 points and that was just the wildcard berths. To be looked at as an actual contender would require 100 plus points and I am sorry Oilers but that just isn’t going to happen. Especially with the Oilers atrocious record against the west last season. Edmonton finished the season 20 games below .500 and to me that is just too much ground to make up in one off-season.  If we are  being realistic and even a little optimistic, I know that is hard for us Oilers fans, I could see maybe 15 more wins next season. That adds 30 points to our total from last year and while it is a massive increase it still isn’t enough to take us to the promised land. I see Edmonton finishing ninth or tenth next season which while not appeasing the franchises need for playoff it does mean meaningful games into March and I for one would be completely okay with that!

What do you think? Has Chiarelli done enough of a transformation to this team to make the playoffs? Where do you see the boys finishing this year? Hit me up in the comments section or on twitter, @cooke_rob, with your thoughts on this or any other hockey related topic. I am always up for a good discussion. Thanks for reading Beer Leaguers and please spread the word about our fantastic little site here!

Cheers!

Rob