Team

Betting

OilersNation has no direct affiliation to the Edmonton Oilers, Oilers Entertainment Group, NHL, or NHLPA

The Oilers handling of their centre depth could be a cause for concern

Photo credit: Bob Frid-USA TODAY Sports

By Tyler Yaremchuk

Sep 28, 2026, 22:00 EDT

Comments

Every year, there is a big surprise at Edmonton Oilers training camp.

Some years it’s a young Magnus Paajarvi, some years it’s Ty Rattie, and some years it’s Jesse Joensuu.

This year it was Owen Michaels, but unlike some of the other pre-season heroes that we’ve had around these parts, Michaels didn’t earn his spot by going on some sort of crazy run of scoring goals or by simply laying a few hits and bringing some energy.

He did it by simply providing a few things that the Oilers have been trying to add to their lineup for quite some time.

First off, he shoots right.

Now maybe it’s not totally fair that he wins a job over a player like Josh Samanski simply because of the way he shoots, but the reality is that the Oilers have been looking for a right-shot centre who can reliably win faceoffs for quite some time now.

Michaels got off to a good start in training camp, and I would guess that once the coaching staff saw him win nine of the 13 faceoffs that he took in the pre-season finale against a Calgary team that featured a lot of NHLers, Michaels had his spot all but locked up.

I’m sure if you injected Michaels with a little bit of truth serum, that even the 24-year-old probably would tell you that he’s a bit surprised to be breaking camp with the team.

Mike Babcock certainly was surprised, telling reporters that Michaels “wasn’t even on the radar at all”.

On the flip side of this training camp surprise is Samanski, who was sent down to Bakersfield on Monday.

Samanski showed pretty well last season. During his 24 regular season games with the club, he was a reliable defence-first centreman, and once the playoffs rolled around, he chipped in a little bit of offence, scoring a beautiful goal in the team’s game-two loss to the Ducks.

Lots of people had Samanski’s name written in Sharpie in their projected lineups for the 2026-27 season and I don’t blame them. But this is another strong example that development is not always linear. Players don’t always take the next step that you’re hoping they do.

Remember at the end of the 2020-21 season when Ryan McLeod came up to the big club and got a ten-game cup of coffee. He also appeared in all four of the team’s playoff games that year.

At the next training camp, everybody thought he was a shoo-in to be an everyday player right from opening night, but that didn’t happen. He was sent down to the AHL after training camp.

He got called back up in pretty short order and has been a solid NHL player ever since.

Samanski being sent down doesn’t mean the Oilers don’t like him or don’t believe in him as a long-term piece that can be of value to the organization; he’s just simply not the answer at this moment.

That could change in months’ time, though, and Samanski will eventually come back into the Oilers’ lineup at some point. When that happens, it will be on him to make the exact kind of impression that he made on Kris Knoblauch’s staff a year ago that made it tough for them to take him out of the lineup.

The Oilers will start the season with their depth chart down the middle looking like this:

Connor McDavid

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins

Owen Michaels

Colton Dach

I am personally of the belief that the Oilers’ biggest strength, what makes them the hardest for opposing coaches to game plan against, is the ability to roll Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl on two lines and have one of those players on the ice for roughly 66 per cent of the game.

They have two elite centres who make the players around them better, and that is something that very few teams have.

So why break that up? The numbers tell us that over the past few seasons, it doesn’t actually make the Oilers that much better.

Last season, with McDavid and Draisaitl on the ice together at five-on-five, the Oilers were plus-2, outscoring the opposition 18-16 in 317 minutes.

With McDavid on the ice without Draisaitl, the Oilers plus-5 over the span of 1071 minutes.

With Draisaitl on the ice without McDavid, the Oilers were plus-10 over a 723 minute sample.

With both players off the ice, they were a staggering -31 over 1981 minutes.

If you convert that to goal differential per sixty minutes of time on ice, here are the results:

McDavid and Draisaitl: +0.38

McDavid alone: +0.28

Draisaitl alone: +0.83

Both off: -0.93

The gap that you get from having McDavid and Draisaitl together doesn’t actually make the team so much better that it’s worth having to survive more parts of the game where neither of them are on the ice, which is when the team usually gets their teeth kicked in.

Mike Babcock is banking on players being able to rise to the occasion with more minutes and more responsibility, but I’m skeptical of that happening.

Just looking at the centre depth alone, I think anyone who has watched this team closely over the last few years would tell you that Nugent-Hopkins is much better suited as a complementary winger, not a centreman who they’re hoping can drive offence in a top-six role.

Colton Dach has rarely played centre at the NHL level. He took 83 faceoffs over a 78-game stretch as a member of the Blackhawks and only won 38 per cent of them. It’s a very interesting bet to make and not one that I’m confident will work out long-term.

It’s early in the season, and the line combinations will constantly change throughout the year, but I am not super confident that the way that the Oilers are currently handling the centre ice position will set them up for long-term success.

Things will likely have to change at some point, even when Jason Dickinson returns to the lineup.