Edmonton Oilers are once again wasting Connor McDavid
By Jeremy Tuch
We all know Connor McDavid is the most talented player in the league. What some of us may not know is that he’s the only guy scoring on this team so far. Is this enough to drag the Oilers back into success?
Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers have only played three games so far this season due to a European trip to start the season. They lost decisively 5-2 to the New Jersey in Devils Sweden, got shut down by the Boston Bruins 4-1, and then scratched out a victory over the New York Rangers by a 2-1 margin.
There’s one thing these three games have in common. The Oilers have scored just 5 goals. McDavid has 5 points. This means he has been at least partially the reason the puck found the net for each of their goals thus far.
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McDavid has a plus-minus rating of zero with two power-play points. This means he was on the ice for three goals against. This also means the Oilers are being outscored without McDavid on the ice 6-0 in three games.
There are all kinds of numbers to prove he is the only player carrying this team despite having star talent including Leon Draisaitl, Milan Lucic, and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. But that would be beating a dead horse. McDavid had a hand in 108 Oiler goals last season out of the 229 they scored. It’s nothing new.
It’s astonishing how McDavid is involved in every goal the Oilers have scored so far. Three games is a small sample size, but five goals also is a small number through three games for a team that’s capable of scoring buckets of goals. The Oilers have too much talent to only be capable of scoring fewer than twice a game.
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To make some sense out of all of this, let’s make an interesting comparison between McDavid and a former Oilers first overall pick, reigning Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall.
Last season, Hall scored 93 points out of 243 total goals scored by the Devils. The next highest scorer on that team was Nico Hischier with 52 points. It’s not a stretch at all to say Hall was the main reason the Devils made the playoffs last season.
Compare that to McDavid last season, who had 60 points more than any Oiler other than Draisaitl. McDavid was the main reason the Oilers didn’t get better odds at Rasmus Dahlin in June. So what was different with the Devils and Oilers last season? There are two things that standout, and neither of them has anything to do with Hall or McDavid.
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One is goals against. The Oilers gave up 22 more goals than the Devils. Now, in a vacuum, this number doesn’t mean much. However, if you look at games that ended in a one-goal difference (not in a shootout), the Devils won 14 out of 22, while the Oilers won just six out of 19. One goal, either way, changes the results of those games.
Another is the penalty kill. While the Devils committed more penalties than the Oilers, the Devils had the seventh best PK in the league, compared to 25th best for the Oilers. The five percent difference between the two teams doesn’t seem like much, but looking at the numbers against the average, the Devils were two percent above average, while the Oilers were three percent lower. When you have 250 penalties to kill (league average), five percent of those is 12.5 goals. That’s a big difference with special teams.
This leads us to the conclusion that McDavid is on his own with the Oilers at the moment while Hall has a team around him. Both teams played three games. The Devils have spent most of the three games dominating, with Hall scoring just three assists out of 14 goals scored by New Jersey. The Oilers, as we discussed before, needed McDavid for all five of their goals.
This article isn’t necessarily ridiculing Oilers general manager Peter Chiarelli for trading Hall to the Devils for just Adam Larsson, as that point has been made several thousand times since the deal was struck. But it does show he has still yet to learn the concept of building a successful team around McDavid.
This proves to us that just because you have the best player in the league, it means nothing if you can’t support him with talent and a system (LeBron James notwithstanding). If that player is dragging the team to the playoffs, the least you can do is lighten the load with some help.
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Ignoring the small sample size we have, McDavid is on pace to score or assist on every goal the Oilers score. That can’t happen for the Oilers to have success. If his teammates can’t help him, the Oilers may never reach their full potential with McDavid. Or they may trade McDavid for Jake Muzzin or something. No one ever seems to know with the Oilers.