The Edmonton Oilers sit dead last in the league with six wins in 25 games.  A 10-game losing streak has decimated any hope of meaningful hockey this season and once again turned the conversation towards the draft lottery. All this before the tarp has been pulled off Santa's sleigh.
 
Conventional hockey logic suggests it is time for Craig Mactavish to fire Dallas Eakins.  In most other markets, it probably would have happened already.  
 
I'm here to tell you, it's not going to happen. At least not in the near future.
 
MacTavish still believes in Dallas Eakins' message and he believes the players do, too.  In recent days a number of them, including Taylor Hall, Andrew Ference and David Perron, have gone public with their support of the head coach.  Hall went out of his way to make sure MacTavish knew that Eakins wasn't the problem in his eyes.  This sense of support from within the room has resonated strongly with the GM.  
 
MacTavish must also know he hasn't iced a competitive lineup for a second straight season and making Eakins the fall guy for some of his miscalculations and mis-fires likely doesn't sit well with him.  Last year it was a ragtag blue line - Denis Grebeshkov, Anton Belov, and Philip Larsen are now out of the league  - and inadequate goaltending that sunk them.  Sure, the rookie head coach made his share of mistakes, but so, too, did the rookie GM.
 
This season MacTavish's inability to address a glaring lack of depth at centre and reliance on career backups in net have hamstrung his head coach. Eakins also doesn't have anything close to a true top defence pair and is nightly being asked to make lemonade out of lemons.  
 
This head coach is failing, the standings make that indisputable…but not with a quality team.  He's failing with a significantly flawed lineup.
 
MacTavish is less than two years into his tenure as GM, too early to say he is the problem. He needs to be given time to untangle the numerous knots he inherited, and those he has tightened. Soon, MacTavish is going to have to clearly demonstrate he has some creative solutions that extend beyond high first round picks.
 
Whether it costs him his job or not, Eakins bares a lot of responsibility for what is taking place.  He is at the helm of this titanically sinking ship and regardless of weaknesses in his lineup, he shouldn't be clumsily smashing into every iceberg in his path.
 
Surely a coach should be able to light the right fires at least once in a 10-game stretch of futility. Shouldn't he be able to find the critical buttons to push and snap his team out of its funk? Yet lines have remained mostly the same. Outside of painfully overdue healthy scratches, there have been no dramatic measures taken, no cold buckets of water dumped on anyone's head, no slap across the face to shock a dressing room out it's slumber.  
 
Instead, there's talking... and lots of it.  
 
A stale power play, poor starts and lack of accountability for repeat offenders of the "mind-numbing" mistakes are all failures laying squarely at Eakins' feet.  So too is the length of this losing streak.
 
In 2013, Ralph Krueger had his Oiler team positioned for a run at the playoffs. The Oilers were ninth in the Western Conference, one point out of a playoff spot at the trade deadline and had just trounced the Calgary Flames 8-2.  Krueger's Oilers then went on to lose nine of their next 10 games and were finished.  During that skid, lines stayed the same, systems remained in place, there was no cold bucket of water back then either. It revealed a lack of creativity and problem-solving under pressure from the first-year head coach.  
 
That stretch cost Ralph Krueger his job.
 
Dallas Eakins has yet to prove that he is any more creative or any more capable of problem solving than Krueger was.
 
But he's going to get more time to figure it out than the last guy did.