Team: 2021-22 Edmonton Oilers

Initial Creation Date: May 25, 2021

Published: May 27, 2021

Salary Cap Mode: Basic

When the methodology of the teambuilding isn't sound.

You don't win games by scoring goals, you win games by scoring more goals than your opponent does.

Every player I signed and re-signed has a positive isolated defensive impact, and more importantly, positive isolated net impact at 5on5. So does JEE. Dumba is an interesting offensive weapon at D, and at least breaks even in terms of isolated shot impact (unlike Barrie who's awful).

I think most teams would see Draisaitl as an incredible asset. But the fact is he plays a *ton* of soft minutes and doesn't really producde much better than expected, powerplay excluded where he's really good. But ultimately, when the playoffs roll around and you hardly get any PP-time anyways, I'm not sure a team that already has McDavid needs to pay for the luxury of having another really good pp-producer.

Keeping for example RNH would be fine here. The only issue is that cap hit correlates mostly with points, and again, a lot of high scoring players make points happen both directions. RNH isn't awful, but defensively solid players that still produce well - like Tatar and Coleman are more underappreciated and would probably cost less money in the end, somehow.

Edmonton has the assets to compete, but the constant handouts of dubious contracts, both in terms of length and cap hit, to unproven players when actual talent is out there is confusing at best. Then there's the post-hoc justifications, like playing a pretty terrible and overpaid Kassian over guys like Russell and Nygård, not because of solid impacts, but because you decided to pay one of them after sticking him to McDavid for a while.

Man, it's not even that unrealistic. If Minnesota doesn't want to trade, check on Larkin with Detroit, or Hertl is San José, or literally anyone who is good defensively and not overpaid because of their production in a relatively bad team situation.

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