Eakins expects rebound season from Yakupov
/Edmonton Oilers head coach Dallas Eakins phoned into the Brady and Walker show on Sportsnet 590 Monday morning. He was in attendance at the Memorial Cup and will be at the draft combine this week.
On what he expects in Year Two with the Oilers:
"Well, I certainly know what we have. I think when you take on a new job, you look at names on your roster. You look at your management. You're looking at lots of different things, but you're not sure exactly what you have until you get into it.
"The one thing I do know is I work for great, great people. People of very high character that are doing everything they can to get this turned around. I'm firmly comfortable with our players now. I know what makes each guy tick. I know what they can do and what some of the challenges are and I know where we are depth-wise in our lineup and that's something that we're going to look to change this summer."
On the team's personality in 2014-15 without Ryan Smyth and if it shifts more toward the younger players:
"I'm not sure it'll be a shift toward them. Ryan Smyth was a great leader. He was doing his best to point our inexperienced guys in the right direction. It was an extremely emotional end to the season with him announcing his retirement. I think there won't be a shift. I think we will continue on with the values and the beliefs with how we think we have to play, and, more importantly, how we have to act in our market. We want good hockey players, but as I said many times here in Toronto, we want good men too. We'll continue on with that message and it's a message that I think was starting to take hold a little bit more as the season went on."
On if he feels his goaltending is now more where it needs to be with Ben Scrivens and Viktor Fasth on board:
"I think there's a real confidence level with those two guys within our room. Early on, we had struggles. Our team was struggling. Our goaltenders struggled along with the team. But with Ben coming in and then Viktor, I thought things settled down.
"Now the problem was, once those guys came in, we were firmly out of it and there was a lot of auditions going on. We had guys up from the American League, having a look, seeing if they could play. So, you know, our roster in front of them maybe wasn't as strong as it was right out of the gate at the start of the season.
"I'm excited to get back to camp, get our NHL guys in there, have a healthy team with some additions hopefully that we can make through free agency or maybe even trade this summer to shore up our depth and see where we can go with these two goalies."
On Nail Yakupov's season and misperceptions in the media:
"I thought he had a challenging year and there were a number of things that contributed to it. This is a kid who, I believe in his first year, in a shortened season, scored 17 goals. His shooting percentage, off the top of my head, I think was 21 percent. You look at the top shooters in the game, they don't shoot like that. It's hard to sustain. With him coming out of the game like that, suddenly the expectation on a very inexperienced player is, 'well, he'll just score 30 goals this year.'
"Well, he's not going to shoot at 21 percent for his whole career. I think him not getting the offence hurt his confidence. There's a certain way we want to play there and it was right across the board, not only for Nail but for Taylor and Jordan and Andrew Ference, Ryan Smyth. We were trying to have our team all play the same way and it's important for the accountability in the room.
"And, like you said, there's an evolution to a player like Nail. He's still learning the game. He's extremely inexperienced and my relationship with Nail is a great one. That's why I kind of chuckle with the way it gets drawn out in the media. You take a kid out of the lineup and suddenly there's a big fight going on. Well, there's no fight. Nail understood what was going on. I know there was some white noise from the agent. I understand that. The agent's going to protect their client and so much more was made out of that than what was made out of that than was really going on. Nail and I have a very healthy relationship. I'm very hopeful and fairly confident that he's going to have a great rebound year."
On how there's always a lot going on behind the situation that the average person wouldn't know about, with reference from host to Jake Gardiner in Toronto:
"And that's the way it is. That's the way it is with coaching. With being an NHL coach, the one thing that's amazing to me is you have to go out there and speak every day. You want to speak freely, except for that you're hesitant to. Very rarely does your whole message get through. It gets put into 140 characters or a quick sound bite and they can twist it however they want.
"I think here in Toronto you saw it when Scott Gordon came out at the end of the season. I think the perception in the city was Randy Carlyle doesn't get along with Jake Gardiner. Scott Gordon comes out and it looks like he was quite amused by that because that's not what was going on.
"So I think there's a lot of storylines that are going on with teams. I know the fans are quite interested in what's going on behind closed doors and the problem is, a lot of times, I think it's really important to keep it quite quiet with what's going on behind closed doors. Even if it's a love affair or if it's a fight. You want to protect that dressing room and have that mentality that 'hey, what's going on in here is going to stay in here' and it's important for the evolution of the group."
Source: Brady and Walker, Sportsnet 590 The Fan
