Since the playoffs are not going to happen for a tenth straight year, I see fans and bloggers looking for measures of progress for the Oilers. Likewise, I am (desperately) looking for these signs myself.

The legendary Oilers blogger Lowetide has been keeping a running total of the win loss record by month and the year to date goal differential between last year and this year. I want to look at it slightly differently. Last summer, the Oilers had a choice to make between retaining an up and coming young coach in Todd Nelson or hiring a proven NHL head coach in Todd McLellan, and they chose the latter. This was no doubt, at least in part, because of a belief that TMac would outperform Nelson. How has he done so far? And, for fun, I tossed in Eakins to see just how bad it really was then, or basically show how low the bar is around here.

It would be great to compare rosters, and in general I believe TMac has had a better roster than Nelson, but injuries have plagued the team through Nelson's tenure (not to mention the trading of Petry) as well as TMac, so I won't go there. Both coaches need to make the best of what they have.

First I looked at the basics - their records. So far, Nelson and his Edmonton Oiler-Barons still have a slight lead over TMac's Oiler-Condors, even with McDavid playing half the games.

Then, I looked at Corsi by game situation. By this measure, TMac's team has more push back when trailing. Eakins' team was still better when tied (go figure?) and Nelson's team was stronger with the lead. Overall, TMac has the edge because of Nelson's team's weak play when tied.

Nelson's poor performance when down 2 caught my eye. I know from comparing Nelson and Eakins last season that Eakins' team spent an extraordinary amount of time trailing whereas Nelson's team spent much more time playing with the lead. Since Puck on Net no longer includes Time On Ice by game situation, I could not replicate this across the three coaches. So, instead I decided to look at it by percentage of total Corsi events as a proxy. I looked at it both in summary and by game situation:

What we see here is that Nelson's teams likely spent more time playing with the lead than both Eakins and TMac. Substantially more so, in fact. When we look at the details, we see TMac doesn't get blown out as much as Nelson or Eakins, but Nelson spent considerably more time with a one goal lead and spent less time trailing. This may be due to the really poor starts to the same we saw under Eakins and have seen from the Oilers over the last couple of months, but that's speculation on my part. If you believe the point of hockey is to get the lead and hang on to it, so you can, you know, win, then you could argue that Nelson did a better job of marshaling the troops.

Overall I would say there is not strong evidence in these numbers to suggest TMac has proven to be a better coach than Nelson, especially when you consider how much better goaltending TMac has had compared to his two predecessors. This is disappointing since the Oilers need all the help they can get. Every little bit of it. Sigh.

Therefore, I don't think we have a clear coaching winner. It is pretty clear who the loser was, and at least that guy isn't coaching for the Oilers anymore.

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