As far as Staios, I think he has his uses still. I still contest that Staios and Smid do not work now, and probably never will. Perhaps you are right though that pairing him with someone in the top 4 would do Smid some good. I have done some number crunching though and, believe it or not, Souray and Staios were pretty effective at both ends together. I know this sounds weird, but I was thinking of Gilbert and Smid together. They didn’t see enough ice time to grade them, but they played well together for the ice time they got.

As for Staios, well, I’m hoping for a bounce back year. That’s all you can hope for I guess. Hopefully he does well and that salary doesn’t look as bad as it is, but we’ll see.

As for the team defense; We’ll see what happens with the bottom six guys. I think Renney will have a lot more responsibility focussed on the bottom six than even MacT did. I’m very interested to see what the new coaching staff does with basically the same team. Should be interesting.

I do agree with your team defense concept. This is something that the Oilers were once good at. However, I think the players best in that role have been traded away (this is a good reason why I want to see a defensive-minded player like Betts or Malhotra signed here). Columbus actually had gone out and picked up some quality 2-way players for depth, in the past in Malhotra, Peca and Vermette (to name a few). I really wish Tambellini would treat our bottom six (in particular) the same way. The bottom six is a perfect area to improve defensive ability, and help out the back-end. However I think Tambellini sees it more of an opportunity to develop our young kids into those kinds of players. On one hand, that does sound great if it works, but on the other hand, I wonder if it *can* work.

We shall see.

Quick query, are we too quick to judge defense and offense separately? The focus on individuals seem to totally eclipse the team-oriented spirit hockey is really about, in my opinion, as we continually judge teams individual by individual. That, in turn, might be a product of our time, and is by no means directed as criticism towards you (or anyone in specific).

Like Pat Quinn said, defense is not up to the defensemen alone, it’s a team effort. Which is why, for example, Columbus can appear to be a very solid defensive team – without any real stars on the back end, because they defend en masse. The Oilers’ defensive corps is certainly above average in terms of individual skill, but can they be a part of a true team defense?