Dave Tippett: 'The house is not burning'
Possibly losing Connor McDavid hurts a team that is already reeling, but the Oilers coach has been 'around too long' to let the calls for his job to bother him
If things weren’t already bad enough for the Edmonton Oilers, they face the prospect of playing the NHL’s second-best team (by points percentage) without the best player in the world in their lineup. Of course, their opponents, the Toronto Maple Leafs, face the prospect of playing without the best goalscorer on the planet in theirs, but the Leafs are not the Oilers these days. Not by a longshot.
No, the Oilers are in their very own hell at the moment, unable to win games, get decent goaltending, play with any sort of consistency or score first. They’ve been chasing games for a month. And with Connor McDavid (and Derek Ryan) testing positive for COVID in a rapid PCR test Tuesday, they won’t know whether they’ll have two of their centers until Wednesday morning.
“The way things are going here, it’s a daily occurrence,” said Oilers coach Dave Tippett. “When two of your four centermen are out and one of them is Connor McDavid, that’s not a positive.”
So it’s fair to say that things have reached their nadir – or at least the Oilers hope – as they limp home from a five-game, post-Christmas road trip looking for their first win. It has been brutal of late for the Oil, which has been leaking, well, oil. It wasn’t always that way. Just harken back the halcyon days of the first two months of the season when the Oilers went 16-5-0 and were leading the Western Conference. Since then, they’ve gone 2-8-2 and have fallen way back into the pack.
And with that slide has come the usual howls from the fan base calling for everyone to be fired. Oiler fans have seen for too long how the organization has squandered away prime years of two of the best players in the world and they’re, understandably, not happy. After all, McDavid put together the equivalent of a 50-goal, 150-point season in the calendar year of 2021. Is it ever going to get any better than that? Maybe not. But as GM Ken Holland stood against the boards at the Leafs practice facility watching his COVID-ravaged team try to work its way out of this, there is a sense of calm. Holland has never fired a coach mid-season and he’s not about to start now. If the losses continue to pile up, he’ll have to answer to an owner and do something, but, whether the masses agree or not, he doesn’t believe firing the coach is the answer to getting the Oilers out of this, post-coaching change spikes by the Vancouver Canucks, Philadelphia Flyers and Chicago Blackhawks notwithstanding.
You can take this to the bank. Ken Holland will not make a coaching change before next summer unless his hand is forced and he has absolutely no choice. Tippett knows that and the players know that.
“That stuff doesn’t bother me a bit,” Tippett said. “I’ve been around too long. And I’m with Ken Holland, who’s a good man. I don’t listen to any outside noise. The house is burning for you (media) guys, but inside the coach’s office, we’re trying to put fires out, so we don’t worry about the burning. Maybe it would have bothered me as a young coach.”
Oilers fans do not, repeat do not, want to hear this, but the fact of the matter is that both Holland and Tippett actually like the way their team has been playing. Goaltending, yeah, that could be much better, and it doesn’t help that the Oilers literally cannot depend on a healthy Mike Smith from one game to the next. Oilers fans don’t want to hear this either, but the hot start the Oilers got on gave them the runway to absorb this very rough patch. There is nothing that will cure the Oilers more than a sustained run of decent results. We’re not talking 10-0-0 here, but, say, 6-3-1 gets them right back on track.
“Teams have struggles,” Tippett said. “I don’t like the adversity, but things were coming too easy at the start of the year. We were scoring in bunches and outscoring our problems and now, we’re the other way. In the last month we’ve used 13 defensemen, we got COVID, Mike Smith has been out. But there are a lot of things we can grab onto here. But that being said, there are parts of our game where we can be better. We have to be better. The house is not burning. You get frustrated when you lose, we’re all in a competitive business, but you can’t let that frustration seep into feeling sorry for yourselves.”
Holland & Tippett are fooling no one but themselves. If they won’t change their offensive style of play they will miss the playoffs. The constant aimless play on the outside fools no one and it doesn’t generate power plays. Worse, the forwards (and D) often get caught too deep and the inevitable turnover results in a jailbreak the other way. The Oilers aren’t built to muck it up in the corners. Get some pressure to the front of the net, keep a forward up high in the slot and the chances, power plays, and goals will come.