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Hmm. So a star player who didn’t want to talk to his coaches. Or, it seems, to listen …

This in fromNJ.com, Taylor Hall on how much he listens to New Jersey coach John Hynes as opposed to how much he listened to his Oilers coaches: “He’s probably given me the most accountability that any coach I had in Edmonton. I really think that’s been good for me personally. Just in Edmonton, I really didn’t want to talk to coaches. I didn’t really want to have dialogue with coaches. I just wanted to play. And a lot of guys are like that.”

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My take

I can imagine Tom Renney, Ralph Krueger, Dallas Eakins and Todd McLellan all reading this and smiling ruefully and thinking: At last the kid has maybe figured it out. A jaw-dropping comment from Hall on one level, as he essentially confirms what others have said about him, that he wasn’t a mature leader on those Oilers teams. Not talking to a coach, not having a dialogue, also means not listening to the coach and at the NHL level that’s not a recipe for success. This quote is an interesting piece in the puzzle about why Taylor Hall was traded. It goes to why the team might well have wanted to move him out and also to his value in trade, which was less than many Oilers fans hoped. Like all young players lucky enough to last in the NHL, Hall is now in mid-career and it sounds like he’s taking a new level of responsibility for his game and the example he sets on the team. He’s having a great year in New Jersey, some say an MVP kind of year. Great to see him develop as a player and as a leader. It wasn’t always clear that would happen, as he was a great-offence, mediocre-defence player in Edmonton, but Hall has evidently decided to change the direction of his NHL career, which is a credit to him. Perhaps the change of scenery to New Jersey, and the shock of playing on another losing team, was something of a wake-up call. These Hall comments mesh with what former Oilers captain Andrew Ference told Bob Stauffer in a February 2017 interview about the much improved atmosphere in the Oil’s dressing room last season, when the team was winning. “The vibe and just the attitude towards being a professional had to change, and that did. And Peter (Chiarelli) did that in Boston. He moved guys around that didn’t buy into the atmosphere that he wanted to create which he knows as a winner. And he did the same thing here… This year you’re obviously seeing a step in the right direction with the professionalism of the team, the battle, the way they’re playing on the ice, the way they’re acting in the city or down in the room… Just that culture, I can’t empathize it enough, how important it is to come into a room and to know that everybody has bought in and everybody is going to be there for each other.” Ference mentioned it helped to have bigger players on the Oilers, but being a closer group was crucial. “Size is one thing and it does help because of pure physics, but the attitude of knowing that there’s not just one or two guys who are going to go out and fight the battles, and then you look down the locker and you know that guy is never going to go to war for you. I mean, that’s demoralizing. It kills teams, to not be able to look across and know that guy has got your back just as much as you have his. It’s more about that more than pure size.” Of course this year things haven’t worked out so well for the Oilers. Is this team less cohesive as a group? Does it have a leadership group that works well with the coach and other players? Or is the issue with this Oilers team purely related to on-ice performance issues. That’s my own suspicion but I’m not close to the team and have no useful insight on the weight to give to these particular issues in explaining the fiasco (though plenty to say about the on-ice aspect of the failures).

Staples on the city

We might finally get the riverwalk on the North Saskatchewan we should have had decades ago

At the Cult

McCURDY: Regression to the mean with the Oilers? Hmm