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Let’s start by looking at the team’s goal differential under the four coaches. This shows how many more goals the Oilers scored than their opponents during each set of eight games.

Krueger’s team only had two segments that weren’t close to (or over) the break-even line, so his Oilers were the closest to getting the job done. Then Eakins took over and everything fell apart: there were only 3 out of 14 segments where his Oilers were close to the break-even line, and 9 of the 14 segments were total disasters where the Oilers’ opponents out-scored them by at least 8 goals (an average of -1 per game). Nelson took over and the Oilers were out-scored by at least 4 goals each segment, including two disaster segments (one in which the Oilers were outscored by 13 goals).

So how did McLellan’s Oilers do? I’d say his team made a decent improvement: in 6 of the 10 segments, the Oilers came within four goals of the break-even line, and only two segments were disasters where the Oilers were out-scored by eight or more goals. Now let’s keep in mind that although there was real progress, this is still a terrible graph showing that over four entire seasons, you can only find FOUR small segments of eight games where the Oilers scored more goals than their opponents!

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Let’s move on to the powerplay. As my study showed last year, the Oilers had a decent powerplay under Krueger, then under Eakins & Nelson they were consistently scoring between 2 to 5 PP goals every eight games (in 75%, or 15 of their combined 20 eight-game segments). When McLellan was hired, most fans looked at San Jose’s great powerplay and assumed that there would be a dramatic improvement. Here’s the graph of what happened: