For much of 2015-16, the Edmonton Oilers ran three pricey
veterans together on a regular bottom-six line. The trio of Matt Hendricks,
Mark Letestu and Lauri Korpikoski made $6.35 million in
actual salary and carried a $6.15 million cap hit, more than Taylor Hall,
Jordan Eberle or Andrej Sekera are paid individually.

It’s hard to argue that the team got its money’s worth from
the trio.

Previously in this series:

As before, this chart was generated via Puckalytics’ SuperWOWY
function, and I have shown the forward combinations for each line on the
far left, followed by 5-on-5 minutes together, goals and Corsi plus/minus as a
unit. I’ve left out zone starts this time, just because it makes the chart too
big, but will be noting them in the write-up below.

For the sake of reference, I’ve also included generic first,
second, third and fourth lines. Again using Puckalytics, I ranked the top 360
forwards in the league by ice-time. The averages above are the unweighted
totals for the NHL’s 90 most-used forwards (three per team), followed by the
next 90 and so on. These are back-of-envelope calculations but they do give us
a point of comparison.

I wouldn’t put much weight on the two strongest performances
on the chart above, as those lines were together for less than an hour at
five-on-five. Take away just three shot attempts from the Korpikoski / Letestu
/ Nail Yakupov trio and it falls below the typical fourth-line by Corsi; that’s
such a small variation that there just isn’t much to see here.

The only really big samples we have here are the veteran
trio of Letestu/Korpikoski/Hendricks and the grab-bag line of
Letestu/Other/Other (all of the line combinations involving Letestu which
played less than half an hour together). The results in these samples were not
good.

It’s clear that Letestu/Korpikoski/Hendricks doesn’t work.
For $6.0 million, Edmonton got a trio which comes in three percent below the
typical NHL fourth line in terms of Corsi and performed on-par by goal
differential. Corsi is the number worth trusting here, because the sample size
is so much bigger; one less goal for this line and it would have been at 40
percent goal for, well back of the typical NHL fourth line.

This unit did take on tough defensive zone starts (37
percent, as opposed to 45 percent for the typical fourth line) but not enough
to justify its poor performance, particularly in light of the amount of money
tied up here.

Letestu/other/other was arguably more effective. The Corsi
was basically even, and a big chunk of these minutes were of the ‘better
double-shift Letestu because there’s a defensive zone faceoff variety’; on the
whole, these line combinations had an ugly 29 percent zone start.

The good news is that it’s pretty easy to spot the weak link
in Letestu/Hendricks/Korpikoski when we look at the with and without you
numbers:

None of the lines featuring Zack Kassian look particularly
good here either, and including zonestarts would make them look worse, since
Todd McLellan tended to ease up on the assignments if he (or Nail Yakupov) was
part of the unit. Kassian has some good points, but his performance this past
season isn’t much of an argument in his favour.

Just one real takeaway here: Lauri Korpikoski. Seriously. Take him away. 

Without Korpikoski, Letestu and Hendricks are a duo that can take on tough zone starts and tread water by Corsi; that’s pretty impressive and add in the special teams stuff and it’s possible to make a case that they’re worth paying. Add Korpikoski and it’s a trio that costs more than Taylor Hall and that gets beat by the majority of NHL fourth lines.