Dallas Eakins couldn’t have imagined his tenure with the Edmonton Oilers was going to start like this.<\/p>\n
The Oilers coach is just seven games into his first NHL head coaching job and he has only one win, one overtime defeat and five regulation losses.<\/p>\n
When you look at the Oilers\u2019 struggles, the best place to start is in net and work out from there. Devan Dubnyk has had goals-against averages of 2.57, 2.67, and 2.71 the last three seasons but through four games this year, it\u2019s been a rough 5.43. It\u2019s obviously a small sample size but those numbers tell you what kind of start Dubnyk has had this year.<\/p>\n
He won’t continue to play at this level but backup Jason LaBarbera has earned the opportunity to at least share the role for the time being.<\/p>\n
On defence, the Oilers have gone with the same group of six to start the season. They haven’t looked out of place or been caught running around but the pressure has to be on them to be better.<\/p>\n
The six blueliners have totaled two goal s(Andrew Ference and Jeff Petry) but have broken down too frequently in their own zone and have struggled to defend the opposition.<\/p>\n
The forward group has been the strength of the team as they have already produced 21 goals, which puts them in the NHL’s top third. An impressive total considering not one of those goals has come from former first-overall pick Nail Yakupov. The team’s top goal scorer has yet to do what he did 17 times last season and he\u2019s already missed two games as a healthy scratch.<\/p>\n
That brought about ridiculous rumors that he would go all Ilya Kovalchuk on the Oilers. I don’t think two games in the press box would give him any sort of reason to leave the NHL. He, like everyone else, is getting used to a new system and a new coach.<\/p>\n
It’s become quite clear that Eakins is the boss on the bench in a way that Pat Quinn, Tom Renney and Ralph Krueger were not.<\/p>\n
This is Eakins\u2019 team to handle and do what he thinks is right. I don’t know if the recent coaches could have done what Eakins did with Yakupov. Maybe they could have but not without scrutiny from those above the coach.<\/p>\n
Eakins is a strong personality who was a hot coaching commodity. He wouldn’t have taken a job if others were making decisions for him. His approach has worked in the past and now Eakins is waiting for it to work in the present.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Edmonton Oilers haven’t gotten off to the start they were looking for but give new coach Dallas Eakins some time to help turnaround a group that has struggled on the defensive end and in the net.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":969615,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[16219],"coauthors":[3004],"class_list":["post-969591","sn-blog-entry","type-sn-blog-entry","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-edmonton-oilers","sports-hockey","leagues-nhl","teams-edmonton-oilers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sn-blog-entry\/969591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sn-blog-entry"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/sn-blog-entry"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=969591"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sn-blog-entry\/969591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":969943,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sn-blog-entry\/969591\/revisions\/969943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/969615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=969591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=969591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=969591"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsnet.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=969591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}