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Many fans are completely fed up with the debate over the Edmonton Oilers trading away Taylor Hall but it’s not going away any time soon.

Why?

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Because both sides in the debate are exactly right. And both sides are completely wrong.

Hall the driver

On one side of the debate are folks who believe that Taylor Hall is an outstanding attacker, a driver of the play, a tilter of the ice, someone who is a game winner. They point out that few players have out-scored Hall in recent years at even strength. Great players win games, they say Hall is a great player, so it makes no sense to trade him for a merely good player like Adam Larsson.

I don’t argue with that logic.

The killer weak link on at right defence

On the other side are those who believe that if a team has substantial weak links at key positions it has no hope of winning, no matter how many star attackers it has. So a team may well have three or four elite attackers, but if its top goalies is sub par or its top-pairing defencemen severely lacking, it’s not going anywhere. Oilers coach Todd McLellan put himself in that camp when he defended the Hall-for-Adam Larsson trade, telling reporters: “It’s insanity if you keep banging your head against a wall. We needed to shore up a hole. I know there is a lot of talk about (losing) that dynamic offensive guy, but we also needed a good shutdown 20-minute-a-night guy, and we believe we have that in Larsson.”