Leon Draisaitl will start the year playing at centre, but it seems virtually certain that he’ll also see right wing fairly early in the 2016-17 NHL season. Where he ultimately ends up is a key component of today’s What Would You Do Wednesday question: Should the Oilers run a relatively balanced three-line attack or load their scorers on two lines?

A preseason injury to Drake Caggiula (he’s presently day-to-day) left the Oilers with little choice but to go with a somewhat balanced attack in the season opener. While Connor McDavid’s line is still loaded up with the best players at all positions, the second and third lines each feature an established C/LW combo. Benoit Pouliot/Ryan Nugent-Hopkins was two-thirds of Edmonton’s top line during Todd Nelson’s tenure as coach (Taylor Hall being injured at the time) while Draisaitl and Maroon were both extremely productive in their time with the Oilers last season.

The game plan here seems pretty straight-forward. McDavid’s line will take on the toughest matchups, followed by Nugent-Hopkins. The job of the Draisaitl line will be out-score the opposition’s bottom-six.

The hitch with such an approach is that the lines are necessarily a little bit weaker. Anton Slepyshev had just 21 points in 49 AHL games last year. Jesse Puljujarvi is 18, has never played a professional regular season game in North America, and his numbers in Finland suggest he may not be a big scorer immediately. Caggiula’s return will help matter, but he’s also a first-year pro. Any additional attempt to diversify the scoring (for example, moving Eberle to another line) necessarily means weakening the top-six.

Once Caggiula comes back, Edmonton will have the option of going with a more potent top-six, like so:

The upside of such an approach is that the Oilers’ star players will be together and head coach Todd McLellan can just ride his top horses. It’s what he was able to do in San Jose in 2014-15, with Joe Pavelski, Joe Thornton and Logan Couture all averaging more than 18:00 per game in total ice-time and more than 14:00 per night at evens. Third-line centre James Sheppard played less than 14:00 night total.

The advantage to a less balanced approach is obvious: It gives Edmonton’s two best lines a better chance of outscoring the opposition. The disadvantage is equally obvious: The third line will play less, but when it does play it will have a tougher time getting matchups that it can win. It also allows the opposition to hard-match their best defencemen against the Oilers’ top-six, because no coach is going to be scared of a third line with two rookies and a guy with a career-high of 34 points in the NHL.

That brings us back to our question: Which general approach is a better one for this roster? 

 

After a long summer of arguing and waiting, the NHL season is right around the corner and that means it’s time for us to throw another party. We wanted a second take on last year’s season and decided that we would celebrate the start of the second year of Connor’s reign over Oil Country. Thanks to our friends at AMA Travel, Cornerstone Insurance, the Pint, Oodle Noodle, and United Cycle we’ve got a big night planned for you complete with raffles, swag bags, and two trips (valued at $5000 each) for two to the outdoor game in Winnipeg courtesy of AMA Travel.

Here’s what you need to know:

See you on October 14th!