Tyler Pitlick remains one of the most intriguing prospects in the Oilers' pipeline. Aside from Taylor Hall and Jeff Petry, he might be the only five-tool prospect on the list. Problem is, Pitlick hasn't been able to put those tools together in a dominant season or dominant run to this point. When I first introduced Pitlick to this list, I talked about his physical gifts:

"If this were baseball and we were talking about a five-tool center, Pitlick would fit the bill. He's a good skater, he has an above-average shot, he's good in the circle, he's physical and he has hockey sense or presence."

And none of that has changed. As Neal indicated in his scouting report on January 18th, Pitlick is not only holding up to the physical rigors of the professional game, he's dishing out his fair share of punishment.

"He makes that 6' 2" nearly 200-pound frame seem much larger. The off-season has done this kid some favors. He's gained a few pounds and indeed throws that weight around. He's never steered away from a big hit on the boards, and his forechecking abilities are some of the brightest on the Barons squad. Couple that size and energy with speed, and Pitlick is a real talent to watch on the ice. And although he hasn't played a lot of center, that wide presence down the middle can indeed be a thing of beauty."

However, as in our previous updates, there remain questions about Pitlick's game, most notably his production.

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Today, we feature a big, physical penalty-machine who struggles with positioning in the defensive zone and has trouble making crisp passes to get his team out of trouble. I could have sworn that I wrote about Theo Peckham already! I jest. Colten Teubert does have his problems, and many of them are similar to Peckham's, but he's also made some important strides this season, which is why he's moved up so far on this edition of the Top 25.

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When it comes to evaluating prospects, the defensive defensemen is one of the hardest types to judge from any distance. Goaltenders of course are in a whole other world, with the prized, franchise-goalie in waiting routinely shelved in favour of the 26-year old with an unpronounceable name who was brought in on a whim. After that most mercurial of positions, however, comes the defensive defenseman. They develop slowly, they can look awful at times, points are irrelevant, plus-minus is rendered all but useless thanks to the fact that the best of them play against the best shooters and typically start in their own end of the arena, and any objective line in the sand is all but impossible to find.

David Musil is a defensive defenseman.

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When Theo Peckham was called up in October of 2009, I saw Peckham's potential as a fifth or sixth defensemen, and identified Rick Berry as a pretty good comparable. So far, that comparison is tracking well enough, although Peckham is clearly ahead by some measures. For example, like Berry, Peckham played his first full NHL season at 23, but unlike Berry, Peckham played a good portion of those minutes on one of the top two pairings (he played 18:36 per game compared to 11:23 per game for Berry). Of course, Peckham was generally overwhelmed in those minutes, while Berry had to crack the 2001-02 Colorado Avalanche, a team that was just a wee bit better than last year's Oilers. Berry played in parts of two more seasons before washing out of the NHL after 197 games, a casualty of the "new NHL" after the lockout.

Theo Peckham has now played 148 games in the NHL, but has had trouble getting into the Oilers' lineup consistently when everyone is healthy. That means not being able to outplay Cam Barker or Andy Sutton. That's a problem. Is Theo Peckham on his way out of the NHL?

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When we tallied up the final NHLE numbers for the 2010-11 season, the Oilers had seven forward prospects with an equivalency of 30 points or better and that didn't include Tyler Pitlick or Teemu Hartikainen. This season, the scoring depth has disappeared. Linus Omark will still score 40-50 points a season in th NHL for someone, but Robby Dee, Liam Reddox and Alexei Mikhnov all moved on. The remaining prospects have somehow simultaneously fallen into a slump.

For a complete look at all of the Oilers' prospects and their NHL numbers, we can use Gabriel Desjardins' NHL Equivalency. Gabe's methodologies are described on his translations page:

One way to evaluate the difficulty of one league relative to another is to examine the relative performance of players who have played in both leagues. Players rarely play significant time in two leagues in the same year, but they often play in one league in one year and in another the next. As long as a player’s skill level is approximately constant over this two year period, the ratio of his performance in each league can be used to estimate the relative difficulty of the two leagues.

After the jump is the full list of skating prospects with their NHL Equivalency and full season projections.

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When the Oilers selected Curtis Hamilton 48th overall the biggest questions surrounding him were injury-related. Touted as a potential first round selection earlier in the year, Hamilton's stock had fallen as a result of injuries that limited him to just 26 games during his draft season. After being selected by the Oilers, Hamilton rebounded nicely from his injuries finishing third on the Saskatoon Blades in scoring last year with 82 points in 62 games and was selected to play for Canada at the World Juniors.

The offensive production was a nice surprise from Hamilton who had been drafted as a strong two-way player who could score but was better suited to the defensive aspects of the game. Having answered the questions surrounding his health, the question was now whether or not he woudl be able to translate that offense to the AHL, and ultimately, the NHL. Through the first half of this season with the Baron the results have been a little disappointing for the prospect we've ranked 16th in Top 25 Under 25.

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The underlying storyline to the entire history of the Edmonton Oilers in the NHL has been "The Boys on the Bus". The men featured in that documentary dominated the ice for the first decade of Oilers history. After their playing careers were over, thee of them ended up behind the bench. Two of those coaches were in place for the better part of a decade and the other has been in charge of hockey operations at Rexall since 2000. Those men surrounded themselves with friends from their playing days, recreating that rambling boys on the bus atmosphere, an atmosphere that's permeated the Oilers for more than 20 of their 32 seasons.

In 2011, the Oilers drafted David Musil, son of Oilers' scout Frank Musil, in the second round (#31), and a few fans raised their eyebrows.

It was against that backdrop that a significant number of fans cried foul when the Oilers drafted Dillon Simpson in the fourth round (#92) in 2011. Simpson wasn't on many draft observers' radar and it looked like a reach. But Simpson is doing his damnedest to prove the critics wrong and show that he was drafted on merit, not the nepotistic policies of Edmonton management.

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If nobody else is going to say it, I will.

I hate goalies.

I've always hated goalies. I played goal in road hockey, but even that was just semi-organized self-loathing. My very first article on The Copper & Blue was actually about goalies and why they piss me off. Goalies are the nemeses of all humanity. Goalies make children cry and grown men cry louder. Goalies are the enemy.

I'm not just saying this because the Edmonton Oilers employ Nikolai Khabibulin, either. Heck, Khabibulin got a shutout last night in Toronto, which isn't exactly the hardest thing in the world but all the same. I just really, really resent goalies. They're unpredictable, they're wild, they're expensive, and after one's finished with you all you have left is a headache and a lottery pick. Trusting a goalie is like drinking $5 bottles of whiskey: you might feel good at first but it will absolutely come back to haunt you when you start offering cops a billion dollars not to arrest you.

That's Ben Massey's seminal work on goaltenders, the most insightful look into the position ever published. Goaltender development is a bizarre concept that defies every theorized law of spacetime ever set forth. Some goalies are drafted in the top 10 and completely fall apart. Others blow away the league and then fall off of the face of the earth. Others win the Calder and then drag their team to the bottom of the league and cost people their jobs. And of course there are goalies that decide to play like the premier generational talent, but only after they turn 28 and only after they're traded for Eric Daze.

I'm on record as comparing the process of developing goaltenders to alchemy and I stand by that. Scott demonstrated that true goaltender development talent is a rare and fleeting thing, regardless of the newly-minuted cottage industry of goaltender evaluation and coaching. Teams should fire their goaltender coaches and scouts and save some money - the results wouldn't change. Seriously.

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