There may not have been a team that had a better off-season on paper than the Edmonton Oilers.
They moved up in the draft, selecting Sam O’Reilly 32nd overall, while swinging a big trade to pick up top prospect Matthew Savoie. In free agency, they made deals with wingers Viktor Arvidsson and Jeff Skinner, defencemen Josh Brown and Travis Dermott, while also re-upping Calvin Pickard, Troy Stecher, Connor Brown, Corey Perry, Mattias Janmark and Adam Henrique.
When faced with offer sheets for Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg, they declined to match, pivoting with deals to bring in Vasily Podkolzin and Ty Emberson. Of all the moves, Jeff Jackson was the man in charge for the majority, with Stan Bowman arriving to deal with the offer sheets.
The Edmonton base and the league as a whole lauded Jackson for his moves, as there was more than enough reason on paper to believe these moves would pay off dividends for the team. They lacked depth scoring in the playoffs, and Arvidsson and Skinner were two players the Oilers looked at to address those areas. Losing Holloway and Broberg, two young, upcoming players wasn’t ideal, but it was easy to think bringing in Podkolzin and Emberson, while removing Cody Ceci, would result in a net positive for the team.
But the problem is that the on-paper success has burst into flames right before the Oilers’ eyes as 19 games into the season, they sit in the middle of the league, 15th overall, with a 9-8-2 record, with the team regressing in many key areas.
Their goals for and against rates are both worse, scoring 0.9 fewer goals per hour and allowing .3 more per hour.
While they’re generating fewer standard scoring chances and high-danger ones per hour, dipping .8 and 2.2 per hour, respectively, they’re also giving up fewer of those looks to opposing teams, cutting back the scoring chance per hour rate by 2.5 and high-danger looks by 1.9 per hour.
The Oilers giving up fewer scoring chances should be a good thing, but the Oilers team goaltending has fallen in a big way, dropping from an .898 save percentage in all situations to an .875 save percentage, largely thanks to abysmal goaltending on the penalty kill.
For as much as we can sit here and talk about how it’s still early in the season, and there are lots of runways left in this campaign — a more than fair point given 19 games marks just 23 percent of the season — nearly all of the departed Oilers are having more success in their new homes than the players Jackson and co. brought in to replace them with.
Here, for example, is a look at how Ryan McLeod and Warren Foegele’s seasons have gone compared to Henrique and Arvidsson’s:
McLeod and Foegele have both found offensive success in Buffalo and Los Angeles, respectively. Through 18 games McLeod nearly has half his total offensive production as all of last year, already scoring half the amount of goals, while Foegele’s pace is similar to that of last year.
Henrique and Arvidsson, meanwhile, haven’t been able to keep up pace offensively, and while there are some positives in terms of them suppressing shot attempts and scoring chances at better rates, they haven’t been able to help limit opposing goals — the most important stat of them all.
The navigating of the offer sheets also hasn’t quite paid off like the team hoped. Holloway and Broberg, prior to his injury, have had strong starts to their tenures in St. Louis. Holloway’s found a home in the top-six, while Broberg had been playing big minutes in his first dozen games. Similarly, there are improvements in terms of shot attempt and scoring chance suppression, but the goal numbers don’t follow suit.
There have been other drop-offs in production throughout the roster, too. While Leon Draisaitl’s goal-scoring rate has jumped, his point total rate has dipped, as has been the case for all of Connor McDavid, and Evan Bouchard, while they’ve fallen off the cliff entirely for Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. Players who are expected to carry the load offensively driving point production have not done so, and that’s a big issue for this team.
One has to wonder if there was too much turnover in this roster from last year to this and how that’s impacting the team’s chemistry.
Other offensive concerns are present, too. For some reason, the Oilers have gone from being a team driving hard to the blue paint to generate shots, scoring chances and goals, they’ve instead opted to start firing the puck from many areas that create much less offence.
The Oilers, simply put, are too talented to continue to struggle like this for so long, but there are things they can do to address these woes. Their goaltending needs to improve drastically, while they need to get themselves in higher-danger scoring areas, instead of trying to attack from the perimeter.
Against the Montreal Canadiens Monday night, they did far too much of the latter, trying to cycle the puck through passing while stagnant — a far cry from what they did last year when they utilized their skating and movement, coupled with the passing, to get defenders off kilter and open up scoring lanes.
These changes need to come sooner, rather than later.
Zach Laing is the Nation Network’s news director and senior columnist, making up one-half of the DFO DFS Report. He can be followed on Twitter at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach@thenationnetwork.com.
