Same old problems surfacing for Oilers; Blues make another bold, aggressive move

The Edmonton Oilers are not getting enough from the bottom part of their lineup and the NHL coaching carousel is rolling again.

There are a lot of ways to determine if a team is a serious Stanley Cup contender, but one of my go-to methods — and I think one of the most important — is the simple question of, “How good are you when your best players are not on the ice?”

Do you have a competent support group around those players?

Or is your team dependent on just a couple of guys to put the team on their backs and carry it?

I do not care how good or productive your best players are, there is going to come a time during the season — and almost certainly in the middle of a deep playoff run — where their production is not going to be there. They are going to see their production go cold, the goals will dry up, and it is going to be up to the rest of your team to help pick up the slack and make up for that.

That brings us to the Edmonton Oilers, who through the first quarter of the season are back to their old shit where almost all of their offense and production has been dependent on the forward duo of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl to carry pretty much everything.

This has been one of the biggest hurdles for Edmonton to overcome during the McDavid-Draisaitl era, and far too often it has come down to those two guys to do it all.

They can do a lot! But throughout large portions of their career they have been asked to do too much without much of a supporting cast around them.

In the Oilers’ defense, they did make some big strides over the past two years in fixing that. It produced some of the most successful seasons in recent Oilers history and had them within a game of winning the whole thing a year ago.

They also made a couple of intriguing moves this offseason to bring in forwards Jeff Skinner and Viktor Arvidsson to add even more depth, giving them what looked to be on paper one of the deepest forward groups they have had since McDavid entered the NHL.

It has not worked as planned so far.

As of Monday the Oilers are 22 games into their season and only have three forwards with at least 10 points — Draisaitl and McDavid with 30 and 28 respectively, and Mattias Janmark with 10. That is it.

Their recent major depth additions going back to last year’s trade deadline including Adam Henrique, Vasily Podkolzin, Skinner and Arvidsson have combined for just nine goals, while even returning top-line stars like Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman have been off to shockingly slow starts.

It is a problem, and the numbers are ugly. Even when you get down below just the simple point production.

They do not score a lot of goals when neither player is on the ice, they give up too many, and they generally get out-chanced. While the overall numbers are not quite as bad as they have been in recent years, they are starting to trend back down closer to that level.

Let’s just look at some basics: Here we see the Oilers’ goals scored per 60, goals scored percentage (goal differential), expected goals per 60 minutes and expected goal share when neither McDavid or Draisaitl are on the ice since both players joined the NHL.

It’s not great.

Let’s talk about it.