A Path Forward for the Edmonton Oilers

The Oilers are bad. How bad? Just look up the NHL Standings. I don’t need to do that for you, and if you don’t know the Oilers are bad, you probably shouldn’t be reading this anyway. We good? Good.

Let me be clear: I don’t believe there's a way to fix the Oilers in a way that is satisfying to whatever mindset is informing the current efforts. Those efforts across Woodcroft’s tenure and now the early Knoblauch days are smushing McDavid and Draisaitl together and hoping to outscore their problems. This approach has worked in the past, but I don’t think is sustainable, and, quite frankly, severely limits the ceiling on what should be a Cup Contender. They need something more substantial, given the harm already done to both their standings position and their team-wide psyche.

The Oilers are generally dominating their opposition to create chances but are not getting paid off for it. They're getting submarined by goaltending. These aren’t new things, and many teams have faced similar issues. But few have been so public-facing and embarrassing as the Oilers’ issues have been, so it is only fair that I throw my hat in the ring. How do I fix the Oilers?

There are clear defensive warts that you simply can't fix with Draisaitl, Kane, and the rest of their offensively slanted forward group. Most of the time, you can outscore those issues with these guys, and they have for years. That much isn’t surprising, and they will be able to do this again. I’m sure of it.

But how do you get there? You can't fix confidence, and the Oilers have none. The second they start to press offensively, one misplay winds up in the back of their net, and we’re back to square one.

The problem is, you have already broken the emergency glass... twice. What the hell else can you do after you’ve fired your incredibly successful head coach and buried Jack Campbell and his $4M cap charge (after the $1M “cushion” allotted by the CBA) in the AHL?

Going back to McDrai and leaving the rest of your lineup to suffer simply isn’t going to get it done. Again, there’s zero confidence in this locker room and in the crease, and it shows. Two charts from last night, per HockeyViz.

Draisaitl and McDavid playing 25 minutes in a regulation game on a weekday in the middle of November is… a choice. They didn’t even play particularly well, but we know over time that is not likely to remain the case. 11F 7D with two guys playing 6-7 minutes up front is another choice. Sure, maybe McDrai can outscore what the rest of the roster gives up. They’ve done it before. But you’re completely subverting your chances of winning with the second line, as RNH is simply incapable of carrying a line on his own.

But again, even if it did work in the short-term, this approach to solving the problem of making the playoffs isn’t sustainable, they have a huge mountain to climb now, and even if Batman and Robin do manage to drag this squad to the playoffs, they’ll just get picked apart by two incredibly deep teams in Vegas and Los Angeles before they even have to worry about the likes of Colorado’s probably-better Stars & Scrubs (Cale Makar is a nice trump card in any situation, as I outlined in yesterday’s piece) approach or the winner of the Eastern Conference.

This team needs to rebuild. They need a makeover. That much is clear. How do you rebuild your team on the ice in the midst of a season? Well, in reality there’s only one thing they haven’t tried to get their confidence back.

You don’t ask McDavid and Draisaitl to continue ramming into the brick wall that sits between them and this mythical Confidence creature, exhausting themselves in the process of simply trying to make the playoffs. But you certainly don’t ask them to change their games. I’m not Dale Hunter over here, trying to turn Alex Ovechkin into Mark Stone. There’s another, more subtle way, to fix this.

There’s something mystical, almost, about the position Ryan McLeod plays for this team. He’s an Oilers Center, yes, he kills penalties, sure and he skates very, very fast.

But he’s not Connor McDavid. In fact, he’s nothing like Connor McDavid, discounting those three things I said above. While everything about McDavid’s play screams “chaos”, McLeod’s game does not. On McDavid, you have no choice but to let McDavid win his minutes in convincing fashion, something he needs no help to do. Letting McDavid cook is always a winning proposition. In fact, I promise you, McDavid will be just fine without Draisaitl or any other well-paid linemate, just please let him have more than one period to build chemistry with these guys before you move on to the next guy.

Ryan McLeod, on the other hand, is how Merriam-Webster defines “calm”. And that’s what Edmonton should love about him. No matter who McLeod is playing with, no matter how fast he skates, nothing happens on the ice. Nothing good, sure, but nothing bad. If you’ve paid any attention this year… that would be a major win for the Oilers.

In the below table, I’ve summarized the past three seasons (with the Orange being this season’s rather limited sample, Blue being 2021-22 and 2022-23 combined) to showcase the data for these “top three centers” on the Oilers’ roster at 5v5.

The most jarring thing here, of course, is that McDavid is yet to score a single goal at 5v5 without Draisaitl or McLeod on the ice. That seems nearly impossible to believe, and of course comes with strikingly similar xGF/60 results as the past couple seasons.

Those ~85 minutes of ice time aside, there’s something else that stands out to me here. Ryan McLeod is simply impervious to the Edmonton goaltending struggles. Is that possibly due to noise? Sure. But it matches my priors to a T, in that with McLeod, there’s zero disorganization, zero chaos on the ice. McLeod’s numbers alone would place him in second/third in the NHL in the past two seasons, behind only the Bruins in both G and xG and the Hurricanes in xG. Via the eye-test and all the issues that come with it, it would make sense that even a struggling goalie would be better behind McLeod than he would behind McDavid or Draisaitl.

Considering McLeod’s ragtag group of linemates over this timeframe, with him being locked into the 3C role, this is quite the feat. He’s being asked to play a role and is playing it to perfection.

So, I ask again: How do you rebuild your team on the ice in the midst of a season? How do you change what the team looks like, and what the goalie sees in front of him on a nightly basis?

Well, I offer this: You change the composition of the team’s minutes, in as such that the plurality of the minutes are assigned to a guy who plays his role and plays it well. You ask Ryan McLeod to play 20 minutes a night until further notice, grinding the game to a halt at 5v5, just so the team can get their damn legs under them. They can see the goalie make a save, and the goalie can gain confidence in front of a guy who, for whatever reason, exudes defensive responsibility. Another table, Orange being this season’s rather limited sample, Blue being 2021-22 and 2022-23 combined:

Continuing the theme from above, it makes perfect sense to me that while McLeod’s seen a bit of a dip in performance from his goalie, the sheer chaos that is McDavid/Draisaitl/Kane/etc. has hurt the EDM goalies to a much greater extent.

Playing Ryan McLeod for 20 minutes, McDavid 18, and Draisaitl 16 isn’t optimal for the team in the long run. Maybe a new coach isn’t the right guy to keep his finger on the pulse of the room and know when to take control of this nosediving fighter jet to ensure a smooth landing.

But it just might be what the doctor ordered as the team tries to rehabilitate Stuart Skinner, establish Calvin Pickard, and generate some confidence that they can be the team that finished last regular season as the best team in the NHL.

Only this time, they’ll be able to march into the Playoffs knowing that when the chips are down, they know how to play both offensive and defensive hockey. Even better, you aren’t exhausting McDavid and Draisaitl, injured or not, and you’re not asking them to give up what makes them so special as hockey players.

And when they get there, they will know that they have overcome the toughest challenge of their season, way back in November/December.

The Edmonton Oilers’ path out of the wilderness starts with Ryan McLeod. This post was always coming, but even I didn’t think it would be coming so soon, and with so much at stake.