Edmonton rolled six "defensemen" last night, presumably because they couldn't find a 7th one inside the organization. Here's the painful truth:
| Name | TOI | NHL GP | Age | Draft | +/- per 82 |
| Gilbert | 26 | 239 | 27 | 4th | -4.9 |
| Strudwick | 24 | 612 | 34 | 3rd | -8.4 |
| Peckham | 23 | 22 | 22 | 3rd | -16.6 |
| Chorney | 21 | 25 | 22 | 2nd | -40.2 |
| Motin | 14 | 1 | 20 | 4th | -9.3 |
| Arsene | 10 | 3 | 29 | N/A | -3.5 |
The +/- is either their career NHL +/-, or their AHL +/- over the last two seasons. Not a lot of NHL experience and lot of negatives…
And here's who Switzerland played on D against the US last week:
| Name | TOI | NHL GP | Age | Draft | +/- per 82 |
| Streit | 29 | 342 | 32 | 9th | -3.2 |
| Blindenbacher | 21 | 26 | 9th | 10.3 | |
| Seger | 20 | 32 | N/A | ||
| Sbisa | 12 | 47 | 20 | 1st | -12.5 |
| Furrer | 11 | 25 | 6th | ||
| Weber | 11 | 8 | 21 | 3rd | 14.8 |
| Diaz | 10 | 24 | N/A |
Mark Streit‘s abilities are well-known and Severin Blindenbacher is the #1 defenseman for Farjestad in the Swedish Elite League. Switzerland clearly outclassed the Oilers with their top pairing. I don’t know a lot about Mathias Seger, but he seemed to go out for a lot of D-zone draws against the Americans. The Swiss league doesn’t seem to like +/- so we can only assume he’s the best defenseman in Switzerland, and better than Theo Peckham. If Taylor Chorney, he of the ridiculously bad +/- in the AHL, was on the Swiss team, we can be sure he’d play less than 23 minutes. Hell, he’d play less than the 12 minutes Luca Sbisa – who has a better case to be in the NHL – played.
The bottom of the defensive crew is a toss-up. Johan Motin obviously has room to improve, but he was a pretty marginal player with Farjestad last season. Yannick Weber falls in the same boat. I know very little about Switzerland’s other two D, but I can only assume that they wouldn’t get abused any worse by Jonathan Toews than Dean Arsene did last night.
Bottom line: the Edmonton Oilers managed to put together, for one game at least, one of the weakest defensive corps imaginable. With Jonas Hiller in goal and a slight edge on defense, I’d imagine that Team Switzerland could beat last night’s Oilers 60-70% of the time.
A word to the wise: when your defense is either racked with injuries or not very good to begin with, it’s a bad idea to trade away your top two defensemen and have to spend a day waiting for their replacement (Ryan Whitney) to show up. Ouch!
