With the Edmonton Oilers lacking a physical presence and Noah Philp landing on the Long-Term Injured Reserve, the team called up left winger Connor Clattenberg.

He was been making a name for himself in Bakersfield in his first full time rookie pro season with the Condors, playing a mere 16 AHL games prior to his recall.

An Oilers fifth-round pick in 2024, it’s not like expectations were high for the guy. But at the tender age of 20, Clattenberg has quietly surprised everyone since he got the recall to replace Philp in the lineup as an injury fill-in. 

Fifth-round draft picks only have a 34 percent chance to play one NHL game, never mind at the age of 20, so that tells you the odds Clattenburg was up against. Even if this is the only time he gets in the NHL — which is looking not to be the case — he’s already defied the odds. 

But in this short cup of coffee, he’s done some amazing things for a 20-year-old fifth-round pick making his NHL debut. He scored his first NHL goal in only his second game and got into his first regular season NHL fight the next game. Best of all, he’s shown he can keep up with the defensive responsibilities of fourth-line play, as he’s a +1 in the early going. You can never gauge an entire player’s career based on so few games, but it’s so far, so good for Connor Clattenburg, and at this point. The player is trending up. 

If he continues to show well, I’d bet he’ll get at least one more recall this season and next year has an excellent shot at a regular spot, which means the Oilers could let guys like Curtis Lazar or David Tomášk walk. 

This has definitely been one of the more memorable NHL debuts for players in an NHL uniform in recent years that I can remember. 

Although statistically I’m loath to further analyze a player with such a small sample size, there’s other skills that Clattenburg already possesses that will serve him well throughout his career. Clattenburg isn’t going to be on any special teams unit at this point, so I’m not going to bother looking at that. What I will look at is how Clattenburg is already taking advantage of his 6’2″, 205 lb. frame — hits and blocked shots. 

In his five games, Clattenburg has 17 hits, good for 11th on the team. That might not sound impressive until you find out that he’s actually leading the team in hits per hour with 28.3. His next closest competition is Kasperi Kapanen, with less than half that at 13.02. Again, taking short sample size into account, even if that evens out a little more and decreases slightly over an entire season, I certainly wouldn’t object for sure, as it shows that with a full season under his belt Clattenburg would vault up to the teams top 2-3 players in hits. Hopefully, he would would be an absolute menace in the playoffs when more often than the not the refs put their whistles away. 

The other skill of note for Clattenburg is blocked shots. It follows a similar pattern where he only has three all season for 21st on the team, but he’s currently sixth on the team in blocked shots per hour with 5, ranking second among forwards behind Adam Henrique. Again, with a full season the player would rocket up the standings to be a top 10 player in this stat line on the team. That, in part, explains his great +1 in +/-, a solid mark for a player in the infancy of his NHL career and on his first recall. 

In this day and age it’s essential for a team to draft and develop well in order to have any success, and part of that means it’s critical that the scouts hit on their post-first round picks, especially in the fourth to seventh rounds. In Clattenburg it certainly looks like we’ve found a hidden gem from the fifth round. The fact that Clattenburg is the first player from his round in the 2024 draft class to play NHL games should tell you all you need to know about how he’s trending right now.

I can’t say exactly what we have here in Clattenburg long term, but again he’s trending up, and it looks like we have a heck of a player who even now has provided fantastic value for a fifth round pick. Keep looking like a hidden gem, Connor, we need this kind of truculence in our lineup.