The Edmonton Oilers have shown up at the NHL draft in the last couple of years with very little draft capital. This shouldn’t be a surprise and is certainly not a criticism. The Oilers use picks and prospects to win, while Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are in the 780 area code.

The consequence of this dynamic is the Oilers have a fairly depleted depth chart in terms of prospects. So, the Oilers have taken to the strategy of signing overage junior players and free college agents to contracts. James Stefan represents a part of the early return on this new strategy. Stefan is the son of former NHLer Patrik Stefan and certainly has some of his offensive genes in him. The younger Stefan has amassed 111-145—256 in 254 WHL games with the Portland Winterhawks. This includes his most recent season, where he went 50-51—101 in 67 games.

So, how does Stefan create his offence? Well, the young man is a shooter. In those 254 WHL games, he has registered 976 shots for an average of 3.8 shots per game. In the 2023/24 season the average was a very impressive 5.28 shots per game. He is a volume shooter with an uncanny ability to find his way to quiet ice far more often than he should. That defensive players struggle to track him down, knowing what he can do is a very handy skill to have. Watch these two clips, which illustrate this ability.

The other very impressive part of his offensive ability is that when he scores, he does so in various ways. Watch these four clips as examples of the variety of goal scoring in his game.

Stefan is going to be very difficult to mark as a professional if he can continue to hone his goal-scoring abilities. His understanding of quiet space, his great shot and his desire to score regardless of how he does it is impressive. He is undoubtedly among the top three Oilers prospects in terms of goal-scoring capability.

The big challenge for Stefan this year will be the other facets of the game. He is 5’11” and 185 pounds, but sometimes he is to easy to play against. Watch this play on the wall as an example.

He needs to dig in on these plays in his zone and help turn more pucks over. This will make him more reliable in a coach’s eyes. It will also help him create more chances for himself and his teammates.

He also needs a little more urgency in transitioning back to his zone. Here is a perfect example of something that happens too much. He takes a crack at the net that misses. This is fine if he simply turns and motors back up ice to help his defencemen. Instead, he doesn’t sense the danger and takes his foot off the gas pedal. The result is a goal against.

This will be Stefan’s key area of development. Improvement here will go a long way to him garnering high-leverage minutes with the Condors.

Stefan and Matthew Savoie, who we will see later in this countdown, bring a dynamic goal-scoring element to the Condors. If Stefan can continue scoring while working on other facets of his game, this overage signing will yield significant dividends down the road.