It wasn’t too long ago that when you thought of the Oilers offense, you immediately thought of Ales Hemsky. His fantastic blend of speed, skill and playmaking ability made him an absolute treat for Oilers fans to watch. It was not so long ago where Oiler fans saw stuff like this on a regular basis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqVgu6ZFKyk&feature=related
and stuff like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yIr7-6gx6s
At that time it was frustrating looking around and seeing the lack of talent that Hemsky had to play with. Hemsky, clearly more of a playmaker than a scorer, has spent most of his Oiler tenure with Shawn Horcoff as his centre. While Horcoff is a decent 2 way centre, who can win faceoffs, anyone declaring him to be a potent offensive weapon is clearly missing something.
On the wing, the last few years have had Hemsky paired for the most part with Dustin Penner. Again, Penner is a decent winger with good hands and size, but clearly not an elite consistent scorer.
Hemsky fans would sit back and wonder- imagine what this guy could do if he had another player on his line, who had similar offensive skill, but more of a goalscorer- a guy who could convert Hemsky’s amazing passes into goals.
Ironically, now that the team has started to acquire and develop some extremely gifted offensive players, it seems that the sentiment towards Hemsky has changed completely. When I talk to people now, the majority seem to have forgotten about how he used to carry the offense. In fact, most people I’ve talked to lately have said we should trade him because we have no room for him, he is injury prone or he is not the player he once was.
It always amazes in pro sports how quickly people forget things. It’s always “what have you done for me lately”. I guess it would be different if Hemsky had been healthy the last couple years, but had just played poorly. That has not been the case here. Hemsky’s number of games have been limited by injury, but while in the lineup his production has been very good.
2 seasons ago, he was limited to only 22 games, but still put up 22 points in that timeframe. Last season, despite missing 35 games with injury, he still finished only one point back of the team’s scoring leader. His point per game production over the past 5 or 6 years would put him right up there with the elite right wingers in the game, yet he does not seem to receive that level of respect around the league and more surprisingly now even amongst Oiler fans.
His number of injuries are not really that surprising if you sit back and think about it. For a the bulk of 5 years now Hemsky was the only real offensive weapon on a team with limited offensive talent. Basically, you stop Hemsky and you stop the Oiler offense. The gameplan of the opposition was to hit Hemsky as much as possible and this was easy to accomplish because there seemingly was no one on the Oilers who could skate (Sorry Mac) and was able and/or willing to do anything about it.
The number of injuries on the team over the past couple of seasons is a reflection of this. Too many teams were able to take liberties with the Oilers’ stars and too few players would do anything to stop it. Tambellini tried to address this with his off season moves. Hopefully the injection of players like Eager, Hordichuk and Sutton will help to keep the Oiler roster in better health than it’s been the past couple of seasons.
Here’s hoping that Hemsky remains healthy this season and can help fans remember how good a player he really is. At 28 years old my guess is his best hockey is still ahead of him.
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