But I’ve always felt that Quinn and Renney (et al) will make a big difference here. I just haven’t been certain if it will be enough to turn this team around. And quite frankly, I’ll probably be going back and forth and wondering that until December or later. But I think if they can improve our special teams (which they have potential to do) that will be a huge factor alone.

This game is all about special teams now. It’s often one goal games now, and if you have a powerplay as crappy as ours, you’re not going to have too easy of a time in winning games, unless you have a penalty kill that’s the exact opposite. Quinn has improved goal scoring (including the powerplay) in both Vancouver and Toronto when he signed on. So I think philosophy changes can have an impact (and frankly, I’ve always thought that). Yes, they’re all NHLers and have been playing hockey for a while, but there is a reason why there is a coach in this game. Believe it or not, they DO do something behind the bench. Without a coach, a team is a group of individuals all wanting to do their own thing. The coach unites them all and gets them on the same page. I would say the Oilers were all on the same page on the powerplay frequently last year, but so were the teams we faced because everyone knew what we were doing!

I tend to agree with you too much perhaps, but it’s not my fault if you what you say generally makes so much damn sense! Last season, we were somewhere between 13-15th in the league at even strength which to me suggests that we had enough talent on the team to potentially be better than 22nd in the league on the PP. Given that we’re icing a similar roster to last year, we’ll see what impact the new coaching trio has for the power play. I think we’ll definitely see some improvement.

I’m not sure if the gameplan coming from the bench was just as laid out as “get it to Souray” or what the deal was, but when you’ve got some skilled players, things should go a BIT better.