"Trust me, we've been looking at these swings and they're a little hard to really pin down," said Chiarelli. "I've had a lot of discussions with the coaching staff and everyone on it. I wish I had a more concrete answer for you, but I think part of it is mental when you have such a swing in performance from game to game."
If the up-and-down play of the Oilers continues, Chiarelli will be forced to consider making big moves to shake things up - but this is also where balance comes into play.
"We're second-to-last in our division, third or second-to-last in the League. It's obviously a spot where we're very disappointed we're in. You have to be vigilant on this type of stuff… but you can't overreact in the sense that you can't just blow things up."
So what does this roster need? As the GM, Chiarelli is tasked with looking at the problem from every angle to find a solution. You balance patience with pressing the change button. You apply trust in your coaching staff, and the struggling players, hoping they'll turn it around.
"You have to balance fixing and going with your gut and applying a little bit of patience," said Chiarelli. "That's not to say we're not trying to fix these things. We mentioned right side, depth on D, depth in scoring. Backup goalie, starting goalie. My point is that there's a lot of things that aren't going right at this point and we're trying to work our way through it."
When a GM speaks to the media about his team's struggles, the players in the locker room take notice. But the thing about these players is they already know what he's going to say - and they know it falls on them to be better.
"Nothing he's going to say out there is going to be ground breaking or something we don't know," said Oilers forward Mark Letestu. "We've gotten off to a bad start. To a man, we all have to be better. As a manager, I'm sure, he's going to look at ways to improve the team, whether that's through talking to the media, or making changes with the personnel. That's nothing new to the guys in here. Sometimes that happens and we put him in that situation. If anything he says is along those lines, it's nobody's fault other than our own."
Perhaps individual players can find personal motivation behind their GM's comments, or perhaps the team was already moving toward more success with the way they closed out their last road trip. One thing is for certain, as the season moves toward December, Chiarelli and his staff will continue to observe the team's performance and look for solutions to issues that don't take an upward tick.
"You have to let these things play out to a certain degree," he said. "You have to act when you think they're not getting fixed. Each of those (issues) I look at individually. How do you fix it? You look externally, you look internally, you have to look at your coaching staff, you have to look at your management staff. You look at a lot of different things. There's no easy answer.
"Nobody's going to help us now. There are opportunities. We've been beating the bushes a little bit and there are things that are coming around. You just have to be on top of it and we hope that we are."
