Player review: Edmonton Oilers Ethan Bear and his breakout season

Fifth-round draft picks usually don’t make it very far in terms of an NHL career. You have a few diamonds in the rough, as you do in the later rounds, but historically most ended up with AHL careers.

So for a fifth-round rookie to step into the NHL and be an immediate impact player the way defenceman Ethan Bear has.

At 22 years old, @Bear quickly worked his way into the Oilers top-four on a pairing with @Darnell Nurse. He’s played a steady game — not something you’d expect from a rookie who looks years beyond his age.

Bear has shown an ability to move the puck with poise while also ensure strong defensive positioning to knock pucks loose and limit scoring chances.

Plays like the one below are great examples of his poise with the puck on his stick:

Bear’s 21 points in 71 games this season rank third among Oilers defencemen and in a very good rookie defenceman class, he’s fifth in total scoring.

Looking at his isolated impact charts via HockeyViz, Bear has a -3% offensive impact and -4% defensive impact at even-strength. The mean is always 0, so what it means is his offensive production is three percent worse than average, while his defensive production is four percent better than average.

Bear’s underlying numbers have been good, not great. At even-strength he’s posted a 49.05 CF%, 48.97 GF%, a 49.76 xG% and a perfect 100 PDO. According to puckiq.com, Bear’s played the most of his minutes against elite competition and while he’s struggled driving play (44.40 CF%), his goals for rate of 56.80% has been tremendous — the PDO of 104.8 is on the high side suggests there may be some regression there.

He and Nurse have played just over 1100 even-strength minutes together the most of any Oilers pairing this year and they’ve been about as average as can be. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Despite some visible struggles at times this year, they’re actually having a decent year together.

Nonetheless, it’s really encouraging to see the progression in Bear so quickly in the NHL. There’s no doubt he’s going to be a top-four defenceman for the Oilers for a very long time and an RFA at season’s end.

We’ve written extensively on Bear this year and what a new contract will look like for him:

On Twitter: @zjlaing