Number That May Interest Only Me: 1,788

I realize I’m repeating a point, but it isn’t realistic to expect a playoff appearance next year. Chicago barely made the playoffs this year, so to say this team next year will be as good as Chicago was this year is pretty crazy.

1) They have to get 50% better to come in 10th place (93 points), let alone 8th.
2) We have lots of young talent who should be better next season. So does Colorado. So does St. Louis. So do the guys at the bottom of the western playoff pool (LA, Chicago, Nashville). Of those 5th-8th teams, the only one I expect to be worse next year is Phoenix.
3) We will se Khabibulin in net for at least 30 games.
4) We have a lot of young talent, but a lot of it is of the same type. Guys like Cogliano, Gagner, Omark, and Brule all probably deserve to play in the NHL, but they shouldn’t all play on the same team, especially when Hemsky/Hall/Eberle are pretty small in their own right.
5)We only have 1 top pairing defender, and he probably will only play 50 games.
6) It doesn’t matter who we draft this year; they will be good, but they won’t have much impact next season (if any impact).

So I get it, it’s been a long time. I get it, we’ve been rebuilding for a long time. The question you should be asking is:

SO WHAT?

Does it really matter? Will complaining about it fix anything? We’ve got the plans in place to be good eventually, it’s really too bad that the first four years of the rebuild were a giant waste of time. Get used to thinking about next year as year 2 (or 3) of the rebuild instead of year 5 (or 6), because it is what it is.

Will Edmonton’s management team be able to keep the fans at bay with more lottery picks, even if the gap between playoff appearances stretches to a minimum of 2,490 days?

Management has done such an amazing job of lower expectations that most fans don’t even want to make the playoffs next year but if we’re looking at lottery picks again next summer I would hope that management is shown the door. Finishing 30, 30th, and no better than 26th is not a good record for any management team rebuild or not. But if the Oilers are a better team on the ice next season that still finishes between 20th and 25th overall they will keep their jobs.

Long term rebuild is a fallacy, an excuse to fail.

We will have all the necessary elite forwards a team can afford after this draft.

The next step is to fill out the roster with the depth up front and top D, all of which are available UFA and via trade.

All teams that have rebuilt well recently drafted the basic core and signed the rest and all that was left was playoff experience and some maturation.

Chicago got their elite D before the forwards so they had time to develop before the forwards came. We have the forwards first so acquire the D.

Dubnyk is good enough for now and may be the guy anyway in a few years.

I also don’t think you can plan 6 years down the road in pro sports anyway. There will be a new CBA, there are injuries, the league could change rules or stop calling obstruction and the face of the game changes, along with the type of player that succeeds, etc etc.

Once you have enough core in place it’s time to go for it and start trying to win, and deal with what happens as you go along, as all the contending teams do. Find players and make deals to fix what keeps changing and going wrong. Rosters rarely remain static outside of the core these days, so trying to build one for 6 years later is likely a fool’s gambit.

I like the way FastOil said it. I honestly think that management in organizations should keep their mouths shut about how long rebuilds are going to take. The sum total of the talent of any team is not all that a team is. It’s so much more than that, and so much depends on the ability of players to believe in themselves and in the team.

We call that self-confidence. I call it managing our beliefs. When I play racquetball as soon as I think I can’t do it, I can’t. When I’m on a roll and think I’m invincible even against a far superior player, I am invincible. I’m a B player who regularly beats A players who are faster than me and hit the ball harder. I am invincible until something happens and I make that mean that I can’t do it. It’s all about beliefs, so why feed negative ones to people that we need to lose for six years?

Last year the Senators won alot of games with a collection of AHL players who believed in themselves. I say that the Oil have enough talent that a few additions along with the right attitude could propel them way ahead of the doom and gloom “Six Year Plan”.