Ryan Nugent-Hopkins Home/Road Splits

Wait a minute, I thought they were getting targeted.

Well, that’s a poor reason. Obviously it’s all three of them. Last fall Hall and Eberle were largely sheltered by the best available veteran, Shawn Horcoff. This year RNH has had little such veteran support, other than cameos by Hemsky including much briefer glimpses of The Good Ales. So they’re getting smoked by the likes of Datsyuk. That hardly makes them unique, now does it?

I don’t think Renney minds that they get a taste of this sort of treatment. You can only learn so much about Datsyuk by watching him from the bench. And while you, Derek, consistently focus on “win” strategies, from an organizational perspective there’s still a heavy emphasis on development. Renney has the task of trying to find the balance, and to this point I give him a solid passing grade. Do I agree with his every decision? As if … never has happened, never gonna happen. Second-guessing the coach is one of the joys of fandom. But another is trying to think along with him, what is he trying to accomplish through the decisions he makes?

That said, your point about breaking them up on the road is a solid one, made sense right off the hop. Now that the season has hit the 20% mark and the youngsters have been taken to the woodshed a time or two, hopefully learning their lessons the whole way, maybe Renney will do something different. It’s a long season and the obvious hope is that the trio will ignite some chemistry. Now that they’ve all had a taste of that, I don’t mind the idea of spreading the wealth at evens, but reuniting them on the powerplay. Chemistry lessons every night! That might mean more buggering around in the post-PP shift, but so what, that’s just another chance for the coach to show us his chops. Nothing he doesn’t have to do already with Horcoff and RNH on the same unit.

Not true. I’ve been advocating breaking up the kid-line on the road. In fact, I didn’t want it put together in the first place (and if memory serves me correct, Renney didn’t have them together for the first couple of games).

I’ve been suggesting:
Hall – Gagner – Hemsky
Smyth – Horcoff – Jones
MPS – Nuge – Eberle
Eager – Belanger – Petrell

With those two top lines you can cover the harder line matches and d-zone starts. The new kid line should therefore be able to get soft minutes even on the road.
As for the fourth line, I’m including Eager simply because I don’t believe Renney will drop him for more than the occasional game (‘simply truculent’). However, I’d be very comfortable with:

Omark – Nuge – Eberle
MPS – Belanger – Petrell
as the bottom two lines should ‘truculence’ lose its hallowed status.

Then, in your mind, was a more pessimistic view reasonable after three home games? If it’s sample size, it cuts both ways.

As I’ve said before, yes absolutely; as you get more data you can be more confident. But the circumstances of the individual games also matter, and it seemed clear to me that the road matches that the Oilers got in the first three games were not going to be what they looked for going forward. A team like Detroit, which has two very strong lines, is always going to be problematic, but against Minnesota (for example), there was no reason to have the kids out against Koivu consistently, and yet there they were.

And I posit that much of it has to do with the team sacrificing at even strength for the sake of the Hopkins line.

That’s happening at home too, probably moreso since they can actually get the matchups that they want consistently. If Nugent-Hopkins is getting tougher competition on the road because the opposition is getting their match, someone else is freed up, and as a team, they haven’t been able to capitalize.