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Time to Change It Up!

Brace yourselves for this one, it's gonna be ugly in terms of sentence structure, flow, grammar and likely spelling. It's a rant.

That's it, I'm done, it's time to change it up. The guys that say we need some size in our forwards are bang on. But this size isn't Luke Gazdic, Wil Acton*, Mike Brown or Ben Eager. It's time for guys like Wayne Simmonds, Scott Hartnell, Patrik Berglund, David Backes, Kyle Clifford, Milan Lucic, Kyle Chipchura, Rick Nash or Arteme Anisimov. Every one of these guys is over 6'2" every one of these guys is in the above 210 lbs and every one of these guys can put the puck in the net.

*Acton is the least worst on a bad line (Not the Oilers problems, but still a bad line) and you can't tell his real value while he's playing with those guys.

As it stands the Oilers have Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle, Justin Schultz*, David Perron, Ales Hemsky, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Nail Yakupov, Sam Gagner and Mark Arcobello are all under 6'1" 205 lbs. The team needs to change this and put some size with in their scoring core.

*I'm grouping Schultz here because for as much as he is concerned with defensive play, he counts as a scoring forward.

This isn't about the guys we have being bad players, this isn't about blowing up the whole team, this is about trading 2 or 3 of the guys in the group we have and getting 2 or 3 from the list of guys we don't have. We don't need 9 guys that can do the pretty dangles/passes off the rush. We need a few guys that are gonna put their shoulder down and drive through a defender instead of around them. We need guys that are gonna go to the front of the net or the middle of the box on the power play and not be knocked on their ass by Matt Green. We need guys that can drop the gloves and throw a few fists at the guy that throws a knee and then turn around on the next shift and put the puck in the net.

For a long time we've all heard the lines, "Well those guys don't just grow on trees!", "Teams don't just give those types of players away!", "What do you think we would have to give up for a guy like that?". At this point I'm willing to say what ever it takes. There's no point sitting around and claiming that they are worth so much more and sitting around waiting for someone to give us the moon for them, because the fact of the matter is they are not winning us games as it stands and if their not winning us games then they don't have value for us either.

Yakupov WILL be 40 goal scorer in this league, but so will Hall, RNH and possibly Eberle as well, Schultz may score 30. The problem is that NO team has 4 players scoring 40 goals a season and if they have that many scoring 30 then they sure as hell don't need a defensemen putting up those kind of numbers.

The Oilers don't need an elite goalie, while they could use that elite defensemen, they likely have that coming in Darnell Nurse and while Oilers fans don't wanna here it, he may be in the NHL next year but it'll be 3 years before he's an elite defender. What the Oilers DO need is some large and defensively responsible forwards that can play on the scoring lines. Look at the Chicago Blackhawks, they don't have 8 guys in their core, they have Toews, Kane, Sharp, Hossa, Keith and Seabrook in their core. The rest of their forwards come in and out of their lineup, their defenseman are capable but not extraordinary and by no means has their goaltending been elite, merely solid. They don't have any goons but they have ability and toughness.

The Oilers need 2 or 3 big, strong, offensively capable, defensively responsible forwards. Plain and simple.

-JR

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