Ban Price trades
Joined: Oct. 2017
Posts: 6,482
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The cancer-in-the-locker room crap is perpetuated by beat writers that more frequently carry water for the Oilers organization than actually report on the team. The likes of Gregor, Jones, Rishaug, and Staples shouldn't have press credentials. They're abysmally horrible at their jobs and very frequently defer to grasp at straws and anecdotal arguments to justify piss-poor moves this organization makes. If it's not coming from Lowetide, DNB, or Willis, it might as well be farts. The reporting around this club has become ridiculously poor, and it correlates with how bad the team was over the past decade.
Edmonton's coaching carousel has a lot more to do with the inconsistency of upper management and routinely piss-poor results. Quinn was fired before Hall got here, Renney's contract simply wasn't renewed and the club made zero progress under him, Krueger was unceremoniously fired by upper management (again, nothing to do with Hall), and Eakins was a genuine disaster not apt for NHL employment (he continues to show this with the Ducks). Nelson was an interim coach. None of that has to do with Hall. It might be time to put the Journal and the Sun down and to wean yourself off of OilersNow. The guys on 630Ched are no better, specifically Stauffer. The man does nothing but act as a mouthpiece for the organization. Pay for the Athletic. It's very, very worthwhile.
Hall is one of the best players in the league: he's genuinely the best player at generating primary assists. Larsson has streaks where he's a great shutdown defender and streaks where he's genuinely one of the worst defencemen in the league. Oilers fans en masse have been sold the exact opposite. Why did Hall excel with McDavid in the World Championships against NHL opposition but apparently couldn't in the NHL (hint: they only got an hour of playing time together total)?
It will always be Chiarelli's second-worst trade as Oilers GM. There's no way out of that. Larsson is replaceable and might not be back next season. Meanwhile, the Oilers struggle with offensive depth beyond Draisaitl and McDavid. The difference Hall could have made since the day they traded him is astronomical. If you can't isolate how shooting percentages work or how bad of a club Buffalo has been this year, there'll never be any convincing you otherwise. It's not even a matter of differences in opinion, it's a lack of honesty on your part. You're cherry-picking parts of an argument to try and justify a bad trade.