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The Edmonton Oilers now have nine wins and 11 losses.

Worse, in their last seven games, they have just one win and six losses. They have let in 29 goals and scored 17 goals, six of them in one game against Montreal.

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They are trending in the wrong direction.

At best, it’s unclear that head coach Todd McLellan has the answers to reverse this trend.

At worst — and this is where I’m at — we’ve now seen McLellan’s work for 3.25, we’ve had plenty of time to judge his coaching and he’s had plenty of time to prove himself as a coach, and it’s evident that a change is now needed.

Why?

McLellan is out of answers. When the losing started, McLellan’s major tactical move was to go back to what worked for a time in the winter and spring of 2017, to put Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl on the same line. McLellan had mentioned earlier this year that he planned to play this card, saying: “It’s important to have a dominant #2 centre and we feel we have two of them. We have Ryan Nugent-Hopkins or Leon Draisaitl. So those aren’t bad options. So everybody wants to put Leon in that hole. We have a young fellow that was picked first overall in Nugent-Hopkins. He’s proven he can score in the league. He’s proven he can check. He’s reliable all over the arena. So there is that option. Obviously Leon being a bigger body and driving his own line on offence is a luxury that we have. And we’d like to play him there. We will start him there. But if it gets stale we can always move people around.” All due respect to McLellan and to RNH, but RNH can’t drive his own line, while Draisaitl is much more likely to succeed in that role. This has been apparent for some time, so much so that before the season the dominant narrative from league insiders was that if the Oilers went back to McDavid and Draisaitl on the same line that would be a signal that things had gone off the rails. As John Shannon told Bob Stauffer of the Oilers in mid-September: “Leon Draisaitl has to be better this year. I think Leon Draisaitl has to be that No. 2 centre that does a heck of a lot more. The moment they put Draisaitl on a regular basis back on the wing with Connor, I think there’s a problem here. I really do. I put that to (Oilers coach) Todd (McLellan) this afternoon. I said ‘Draisaitl has to be the No. 2 guy. He has the Malkin to Crosby.’” In his last four years as an NHL coach, McLellan has made the playoffs once. He’s not on track to guide the Oilers to the playoff this year, so that would be just one playoff spot in five years. At the same time, this is a team with Connor McDavid in his fourth NHL season, and other talented players in their prime, namely Leon Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Oscar Klefbom, Adam Larsson and Darnell Nurse. This is a team that should make the playoffs. If that’s going to happen, they can’t get in any deeper hole. They’ve got to move up fast and they’ve got to do it pronto. After 3.25 seasons, McLellan has had his chance with this roster. There’s a raging debate among Oilers fans as to whom is most to blame, Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli or Todd McLellan or the players. Most fans blame Chiarelli, and with some justification. He lavished a huge contract on under-performing Milan Lucic and he moved out valuable assets yet failed to acquire a strong puck-moving defenceman or defencemen, with that lack of mobility and puck-moving on the blueline continuing to be a major issue. If Chiarelli were fired this week as well I would see the logic, though it’s also the case that the Oilers farm system is finally stocked with talent and Chiarelli deserves credit for that. And the fact of the matter is that firing Chiarelli will do little or nothing to get the Oilers moving in the right direction right now. That kind of change can only come with player movement or with a coaching change. At this stage of an NHL season, player movement is not a likely option but changing the coach is an option. It has been seen in the past to have a major impact on the direction of some teams, such as the Pittsburgh Penguins winning the Cup after Mike Sullivan took over in December 2015. Chiarelli’s future with the team hinges on the team making the playoffs this year. It would a mistake for him not to now change coaches, to find out if some other coach might get better results with this roster that Chiarelli himself has assembled. It’s certainly a possibility that such a change would do the trick. A number of skilled offensive players — Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle, Justin Schultz, Jesse Puljujarvi — have not fully clicked in McLellan’s system and are no longer on the Oilers, though Puljujarvi is still in the organization. How much of that is on the coach and how much is the players? That is hard to tell, but that’s a lot of offensive talent that’s not fired on all cylinders here. McLellan is obviously a good coach and a strong leader. He had success in San Jose. He had success here in 2016-17. At the same time, given the limited options the Oilers have to shake up things, given the fact that McLellan has worked with this essential roster for 3.25 seasons now and he’s had plenty of opportunity to build a winning program, I’m in the camp that wants to see if some other coach can get more out of this group. If that can’t happen, bigger changes will be needed but I want to see how the team does under another coach before major trades are made. Essentially, I’d like a second opinion on what ails this team, a new coach with a new philosophy to see if he can take this group higher. The argument for not moving out McLellan last year when the team lost was that there had been too many coaching changes in this organization, too many disruptions. But McDavid has had just one Oilers coach, McLellan. Maybe it’s time he had a different coach. The vast majority of NHL teams have changed coaches since McLellan was hired in May 2015. The longest serving NHL coach, Jon Cooper, was hired in March 2013. Nashville hired Peter Laviolette in May 2014. Paul Maurice was hired in Winnipeg in January 2014. So only three coaches pre-date McLellan in Edmonton. The same spring of 2015 that McLellan was hired so were four other coaches who are still with their teams: John Hynes in New Jersey, Dave Hakstol in Philadelphia, Peter DeBoer in San Jose, Mike Babcock in Toronto. But every other NHL team has changed its coach since then. That includes a number of teams ahead of Edmonton in the standings, such as Columbus, the New York Islanders, Buffalo, Boston, Minnesota, Calgary, Dallas and Colorado. The year after McLellan was fired in San Jose, that team went to the Stanley Cup finals with a new coach, a height that McLellan was unable to attain with that team. The last straw for many fans, including me, came in the Calgary game when the Oilers utterly collapsed in the third period. Calgary had too much skill and speed on the roster. Chiarelli has assembled a roster with too many big, slow players, but McLellan has also often chosen to go with bigger, slower players, including with Milan Lucic down the stretch of the Calgary loss on the same line with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. It made sense to go with Lucic for a shift or two on that top line given how rough and violent the game had become, but when the team needed a goal, how did it make sense to keep Lucic there? He’s struggling to make any kind of an offensive play. The attacking prowess of that top line went right out the window, and with that top line utterly stacked with McDavid and Draisaitl, where else were the goals going to come from? The coach played his hunch, went with his gut, as he should have done. But the proof is in the result. That Calgary result and too many results have been bad, so it’s time to move on. At this point for the Oilers not to act, for them not to get that second opinion on the roster Chiarelli has put together, would indicate they’ve become too complacent. As for Chiarelli, if a new coach can’t turn things around, time for him to go as well. Finally, Joel Quenneville. If the Oilers aren’t investigating his interest, they’re not doing their job.

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