Ghosts Of Oilers Past: Dallas Eakins

After starting the offseason with chaotic noise during Edmonton’s head coach hiring period, let’s have a laugh and reminisce about a failed coaching experiment. The Oilers had just capped off year 7 of their 10-year playoff drought in the year 2013. It was shortened to 48 games and started in January due to a league lockout. The team still got a top 10 pick in the draft, but it wasn’t in the top 5 or first overall this time. They were even in a Playoff race for the last 10 or so games. They ultimately didn’t clinch, but they did improve.

On one end, it was then head coach Ralph Krueger’s first NHL season in such a position, and he was liked by the players. On the other end was Dallas Eakins, who coached the AHL’s Toronto Marlies to a Calder Cup Final appearance the previous year. Oilers alumnus and former Oilers head coach Craig MacTavish had just been hired to be the franchise’s 8th general manager, replacing Steve Tambellini, who’d held the position from July of 2008 until the end of this referenced season. MacTavish admitted as much that the firing of Ralph Krueger looked unfair to him, given that he didn’t even have a full 82-game season to work with, and it was one of the best seasons they had in the standings during the Decade of Darkness. MacT thought the potential in Eakins was too good to pass up on.

Going slightly off topic for a minute, I have an uncle and a cousin who are Buffalo Sabres fans. You may remember that Krueger’s last NHL gig was with Buffalo in the 2021 Pandemic season that saw 56 games. A few years ago, during a family function, my cousin said to me, “I don’t know how Ralph Krueger was for your team, but…” I told them that Oilers fans liked Krueger, and their team played well under him. He even had former Oiler Taylor Hall on his Sabres, I thought that reunion would be positive. But Ralph was fired halfway through that season, as Buffalo looked like America’s version of the Oilers before 2026. I told my cousin I was honestly surprised Krueger did that badly with them. Clearly, perspective matters.

Part of the aura in Dallas’s potential is that he was said to be really good at communicating with younger hockey players, which you’d think could’ve boded well with Edmonton’s young core that needed to start winning more games. He even had a decent idea of competition in his hiring press conference when he said “No matter you’re a first line guy, the 6th defenseman, the 23rd man on the roster, a player playing in the minors, you are going to compete to play for this hockey team.” The problem is, if you remember watching them on the ice, there wasn’t a lot of competing that we can recall seeing.

Have you ever heard of swarm defense? If not, allow me to explain. It’s a hockey system where, essentially, all five of your skaters move towards whoever is carrying the puck. This is supposed to scare the opposition into giving the puck away by accident. That would sound like a neat idea in theory, if it didn’t leave the other four opposing skaters wide open and hang your goalie completely out to dry. Not that Ben Scrivens and Victor Fasth weren’t objectively bad in 2014/2015; just look at their stats. But this defensive style also forces anyone in the net to attempt more than what’s necessary as a way of compensating for the awful play in front of them. This is how you play street hockey or pond hockey; it’s not an adequate pro-league system for a roster with their best players being in their early 20s and having no Playoff experience.

Probably the one interview for me that cements how his coaching was is when a reporter asked him during a post game presser about physicality within a game. He said, “The perfect game is no hits. Do you know why? Because you have the puck.” It may’ve had something to do with him being very big on Analytics, but he took that too far. He was also against his players standing up for teammates after a hit because he didn’t want to risk them taking penalties. Not that I think every clean hit warrants a fight or a tug, but some that are vicious or close to it absolutely do. Most Western Conference teams, especially in the Pacific Division, were built around size in the 2010s. So encouraging your team to be soft in a contact sport was another internal issue that developed a losing culture.

How he utilized Nail Yakupov started the ongoing trend of stapling scoring forwards to the 4th line. Remember when I brought up Ralph Krueger? Here’s another fun fact. While he didn’t do that same thing to Yakupov, he did do it to Jeff Skinner in Buffalo. It’s hilarious that when Skinner came to Edmonton, he went through that all again. Former Oilers enforcer Luke Gazdic recently shared a story about Eakins on Dustin Nielson’s podcast. He talked about a day after the Oilers got blown out on another Saturday night of Hockey Night In Canada, they were bag skating hard, and Eakins yelled, “You think I’m going down without a fight?” before getting fired. His team was 7-19-5 to start that season when he was relieved of his duties. He also had a reputation of being a fitness nut, which he wanted to instill in his Oilers coaching time through changes in media and player snack areas. It turns out that replacing coffee and donuts with fruits and vegetables wouldn’t make any Oilers defenseman a Norris trophy winner, or make any Oilers goalie a Vezina trophy winner. Nor would it improve bottom 6 scoring.

He eventually found himself another NHL gig, head coaching the Anaheim Ducks from 2019 to 2023, no improvements there. Before that, he’d been hired to coach Anaheim’s AHL affiliate, the San Diego Gulls. He once again had better showings at the AHL level than at the NHL level. It just goes to show that success in a lower league doesn’t always translate to success in a higher league. As of November in 2023, he’s currently the head coach and general manager of Adler Mannheim from Germany’s DEL. His time in Edmonton is remembered as the time that really set a young, desperate team back steps which felt longer than if you were walking up the Spanish Steps. When he gave his firing press conference, he had an ixnay on Kumbaya type of message about the locker room vibes. But while it is normal to have frustration when you keep losing. It shouldn’t escalate to the point where you never improve. The latter is what it felt like under him. Frequent coaching changes in Edmonton have been a tradition since MacT’s last season behind the bench in 2009. I think late 2014 is the only time every Oilers fan was on board with a change. The only positive thing about his tenure is that, were it not for him, we wouldn’t have Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid.