Originally Posted by
aznbluff
Calgary sucks. But they knew they would suck this year. They have no talent on the roster, just journeymen veterans. But they are professional hockey players and at least come out and give an honest effort every night. Even if you suck you can try hard and finish with ~65 points as a team at the end of the year. They have a solid developing player in Monahan and a potentially top 3 pick this year. They will learn to play the game the right way from these hardworking plugs with little talent but good work habits and professional experience. They should turn it around some time in the next 5 years.
Meanwhile Edmonton just sucks. It's an internal competition on the roster to see who can do the most toe-drags between Hall and Eberle. The loser pays the bar tab that night, so they are both going balls to the wall to up their toe-drags per game stat every game. Eberle had about 4 this game, while Hall tried one on Ryan Suter, who waved his big stick at him and rendered $6M Taylor Hall completely impotent for 20 straight minutes tonight.
Yakupov doesn't know how to play hockey and it's up for debate whether he will ever learn to do so. Stands still, gets crushed at the opposing blue line, no reaction from the team, odd man rush the other way and a goal against. Pure Oiler hockey right there. At times during the game tonight, you could hear Suter's thoughts through the TV; after Hall tried to dangle him you could hear him think "Holy fk you guys suck at hockey, wow" to which Hall and Eberle could only respond by putting their heads down and skating to the bench.
MacT seems to insist on giving up assets to add irrelevant pieces to the roster, while ignoring or being handcuffed to improve the parts of the team that matter. This team will not be good for as long as this core is still playing in the NHL. They actually don't know how to play NHL hockey and refuse to learn. Why should they? They have their $6M/year long term deals already and get fed prime ice time regardless of how badly they play.
Somehow, though, the icing on the cake is that as desperate as Edmonton is to get better and try to improve in the standings, while Calgary is literally selling off the team trying to suck more, Calgary is still somehow better than the Oilers. Just sad.