As the Edmonton Oilers “enjoy” an additional rest day between Tuesday night’s hard-fought game in Vegas and Friday’s match in Anaheim, it’s a quiet Thursday in Oil Country. Not much of an advantage considering the Oilers have played less games than any other NHL team and had the previous nine days off. The 32 NHL teams will have played 800 games by the end of play on Thursday night, with each team averaging exactly 50 games played. The Oilers will remain seated at number 46.
Stated otherwise, today marks Day #122 of 192 in the 2023–24 season, or 63.5% of the allocated calendar, for salary cap purposes. At an average of just 2.6 games each week, the Oilers will have played just 56% of their games.
The average NHL team will play 3.2 games a week in the meantime.
Fortunately, the Oilers have been dominant over the last two and a half months, winning 24 games and dropping just four, following a very dreadful first six weeks of the season. From a pitiful thirty-ninth place in the NHL standings on US Thanksgiving, where their.306 points percentage was more than 100 basis points out of 28th and almost 250 out of 16th, they have risen to the top. With a.641 %, they now hold the ninth-place position in the league and are more than 100 basis points ahead of the first team in the West below the playoff cut line.
It is challenging to consider the Oil’s 2023–24 campaign as a cohesive unit due to the stark differences in their performance under the two different coaches. So let’s assess the whole of the negative and the positive in this final moment of clarity before the frenetic finish line. What is the Oilers’ position in relation to the NHL as a whole?
Examining team statistics
We’ll use NHL.com’s Summary page of team statistics for our purposes today, with a greater emphasis on the league rankings within each area than on the raw data. The page has some repetition, therefore we’ll concentrate on these eight important numbers here: Three of them are offensive, three are defensive, and the first and last are cumulative. In addition, two columns each concentrate on one of the special teams, while the remaining six take results into account in all scenarios.
This is what the 2023–24 Oilers have said thus far:
Points percentage: 29-16-1,.641 P%, good for ninth place in the NHL right now.
Goals per game: 159 in 46 games, or 3.46 goals/game, ranks sixth.
Against goals per game: 46 x 127 = 2.76 GA/GP, eighth place.
Powerplay percentage: third place, 26.8% PP%, with 38 goals in 142 opportunities.
26 goals against in 155 opportunities equals an 86.5% penalty kill percentage, ranking fourth.
1551 in 46 shots on goal per game = 33.7 SF/GP, second best.
3rd place, 1286 shots against per game in 46 = 28.0.
1399 wins in 2681 faceoffs = 52.2%, ranking seventh in faceoff win rate.
Lookit, hey! In eight of the eight categories, the Oilers are among the NHL’s top 10. They regularly rank in the top fourth of the league, although they aren’t the best in any one aspect.
Fans of the Oilers have undoubtedly witnessed the most evenly matched team since at least 2016–17, when the team placed seventh in the standings, eighth in goals for, goals against, and shots for, and ninth in shots against. However, that team was worst in the league at the faceoff dot and lacked strength on the penalty kill.
The Oilers’ league rankings in the selected categories following their 2015 Connor McDavid lottery win are shown here. Rankings for 2023–24 are up to Wednesday, February 7
A little colour coding to help us along here. Green is good, with #1 rankings highlighted, 2-5 in a mid-green background, 6-10 in light green, and 11-16 listed in green font. The reverse is true for poor outcomes; the redder the cell, the worse the ranking.
It’s a sad fact that the club struggled through three of McDavid’s first four seasons, save for that one 2016–17 season when it seemed like everything was coming together quickly. proved to be an illusion, as the team regressed for two more seasons, bringing Peter Chiarelli’s time as general manager to an end. The team continuously had dismal performance in terms of goals for and against over the three miserable years of the Four, which was a surefire prescription for collapse.
