Taylor Hall: Firing Dallas Eakins Would Be 'So Unfair'

Taylor Hall thinks it would be ‘totally unfair’ to fire Edmonton Oilers head coach Dallas Eakins

At the start of the 2014-2015 season, guys like Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and Nail Yakupov were thrilled to head into their first consecutive season with the same head coach.

More from Edmonton Oilers

If that doesn’t tell you how things have done in Edmonton in recent years, I don’t know what does.

Many were shocked Eakins was heading Edmonton once more, though; he was one of the coaches rumored to be on the hot seat following an extremely disappointing 2013-2014 campaign. Thirteen games into the new season, and it looks like he’s right back where he was in April.

When star winger Taylor Hall spoke to the media following a 7-1 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks Saturday night, though, he defended his head coach. Per NBC’s Pro Hockey Talk, Hall expressed his belief that firing the coach would be “totally” unfair, insisting that the team’s position at the bottom of the league wasn’t Eakins’s fault.

Looking at the team’s roster, Hall is almost certainly correct.

The Oilers used three consecutive first overall picks to select Hall, Nugent-Hopkins, and Yakupov; these three were snapped up on the heels of fellow offensively-gifted winger Jordan Eberle and center Sam Gagner.

They followed those five up with blue liner Darnell Nurse, but haven’t done much else to fix the team’s blue line — and in net, they swapped out former first round pick Devan Dubnyk for Toronto Maple Leafs and Los Angeles Kings backup Ben Scrivens. They’re one of the worst defensive teams in the NHL, and that’s as much on the roster management as it is on the coaching staff.

This was the argument at the end of last season when the Leafs chose to extend head coach Randy Carlyle rather than terminate him; the players are accountable for what they do on the ice, and bad roster management can make it hard for even the best coaches to pull wins out of team.

This sounds more like the issue in Edmonton than any wrongdoings by Dallas Eakins — but if so, the fix isn’t going to be pretty. It’ll likely still involve some lost jobs (starting with the general manager, Craig McTavish), which will almost certainly have to be followed by a big name roster move. Which… we appreciate your support for your coach, Taylor Hall, but that roster move could be you.

Amid speculation that Eakins was potentially fired following the loss to Chicago, it should be interesting to see how the team handles what has been nothing short of a disastrous start to the season.

More from FanSided

Home/Edmonton Oilers

Taylor Hall: Firing Dallas Eakins Would Be ‘So Unfair’

By Catherine Silverman | Nov 23, 2014

Taylor Hall thinks it would be ‘totally unfair’ to fire Edmonton Oilers head coach Dallas Eakins

More from FanSided