BLOG: Oilers offseason of improvement begins now

EDMONTON, AB -With the Oilers Stanley Cup dreams cut short, the post-season postmortem begins.

The self-assessment starts at the top as Head Coach Jay Woodcroft and his staff look to dissect why their season ended in May and how to continue building towards a squad which ends the year as the last team standing. Despite the Oilers not progressing as far in the playoffs as they did in 2022's Western Conference final run, the belief internally is that the latest iteration of the Oilers was a better team - a belief Connor McDavid reiterated at the Oilers end-of-season press conference.

Still, a trio of 100-point scorers, the league's best offence, the most successful power-play in NHL history, and winning 14 of their last 15 games heading into the playoffs was not enough for the Oilers to achieve their ultimate goal. It's back to the drawing board for Woodcroft and his crew as they look to add to their toolkit going into next season.

"I'm not going to stand up here and say we just have to do what we do, but we have to do it better. I think part of evolving as a team is adding layers to your game," Woodcroft said. "If I were to look at the games [in the Vegas series], I think we had the lead in every one of them, so we were doing some good things as well. There were moments that we think we can handle better. Is that a tactic? Is it individual execution? That's part of the work that we're going to do.

"We're serious about it and as I said, we are in this with our players. This is not pointing fingers in any one way. This is about how do we collectively come up with solutions and find answers."

The people inside the organization and inside the locker room know that this team is close. The Oilers core is in the prime of its career and they have shown the ability all season long to beat the league's top opponents. Not only that, but the Oilers season was also an incredible display of resilience to fight through a difficult and injury filled November and December to emerge as the Western Conference's second-best team.

With all the positives of 2022-23, in the end it just made the Oilers second round exit hurt even more.

"I think Ken [Holland] used the word devastated. I would echo that," Woodcroft said. "I think you go through stages. The first one is feeling that way. The next one is learning how to repurpose that disappointment. The way you do that is by learning some lessons and you use that experience to serve as your motivational fuel. What do I mean by that?

"When you're in a workout and it's the middle of June that helps push you forward when maybe your family or friend group is pulling you in a certain direction, you have this experience or this pit in your stomach to help serve as motivational fuel for the things that need to happen in order to set ourselves up to have a really good training camp, which is the first step. Those are all part of the process of learning lessons along the way of gaining experiences, sometimes painful ones, but in the end you hope the payoff is that if you continue to knock on the door and you learn some of those hard lessons that one day that door opens."

The feeling in the pit of the stomach that Jay Woodcroft described is one that is shared by McDavid. Already driven to improve, as evident by his 64 goal and 153 point campaign, the Oilers captain will be using the results of a postseason run cut short to add more fuel to his already burning fire to get better.

"I think just that kind of empty feeling that you're kind of left with. I think it's great fuel," McDavid said. "You don't want to feel that feeling anymore. I think for us to understanding how far away it is just to be back in that very same position," McDavid said.

The Oilers ambitions will only be underpinned by their offseason work ethic. There are lessons to be taken from their year of adversity, triumph, expectations, and eventual anticlimax. Those lessons will be applied in their offseason work in the gym and the film room as they watch another team achieve what everyone in the franchise felt was attainable for their group.

As Woodcroft addressed the media in his final availability of the 2022-23 season, he gave Oil Country insight into one of his own lessons learned as he prepares to head off for a long summer of work to improve his team.

"I learned how much of an appreciation I have for being the head coach of this team, this organization, and how much respect I have for our players," he said. "I can tell you that when we said goodbye to the group at large [on Tuesday], that was the end of 236 days together, working together, grinding together, and we all, to a man, felt that it was too early."