This just in from the PDOcast, their ranking of the most watchable teams in the NHL from one to 32, with the Calgary Flames ranked the least watchable and the Edmonton Oilers ranked the second most watchable team in the league behind only the high-flying Colorado Avs.
Why so high for Edmonton, which has just 10 points in 10 games and is playing some miserable hockey?
“All hail McDavid,” said Thomas Drance, a Sportsnet radio commentator in Vancouver. “We can move on. They’ll figure it out. The October Edmonton Oilers should be ranked like 25th, but we all know that they’re going to be a different team in December, January, February, March, April, May, June.”
The show’s host Dmitri Filipovic, NHL Analyst at Elite Prospects Rinkside, noted the Oilers are just 30th in the league when it comes to five-on-five offence and are shooting below seven per cent. “They’re just not scoring when McDavid and Dreissel aren’t out there.”
“They just hate October,” Drance said. “They hate the fall… I think they’re soaking up the last of the Edmonton weather where it doesn’t hurt to be outside. And then the moment winter comes, they’re just like, ‘Okay, now we’ll dial it in.’ It’s got to be something like that… How else do you explain this? They are clearly one of the three or four best teams in the league. And they are clearly the 29th best team in the league every October. It doesn’t make sense.”
Said Filipovic: “This could be a glass half full or glass half empty, depending on your perspective. But with all the new players they have up front, the line blending right now is crazy when you tune into a game and you just have no idea who’s going to be playing with who. And so on the one hand it’s interesting because it’s new. On the other, I think there’s just so little stability. It’s a bit disorienting tuning in.”
My take
1. The Oilers were so rancid at times in their two weekend losses to Seattle and Vancouver that I have zero doubt many fans turned off the games. That said, overall, of course the Oilers are still a compelling team to watch, even if it’s just to see how they’re going to blow up good, thus finding a way to lose another October game.
On Sunday hight in Vancouver, it was Mattias Ekholm’s turn to wear the goat horns, making a bad line change on the first goal against and getting deked out on the second.
But it’s been a revolving door of Oilers players who have stunk it out game to game, and the team itself has been a shadow of its 2024 and 2025 playoff self. It’s interesting to behold if you’re fascinated by car crashes, and judging by how people slow down on the highway to gawk at a wreck, that’s a large number of people.
At the same time, if the Oilers finally do start to hum, if they find linemates that work with one another, if they can get their passes to connect in a way they’ve failed to do so far, this team could morph into an attacking juggernaut. The speed and skill is there already, even as the execution has been so lacking.
2. The list of things going right for the Oilers is small. The list of things going wrong is huge.
The team lacks fight and toughness, with supposed power forward Trent Frederic failing to live up to his billing in the early going.
If a player plays well he gets promoted to Connor McDavid’s line where he promptly and invariably has his worst game of the year.
With seven new forwards on the roster, Coach Kirs Knoblauch can’t find lines that work and he can’t even count on pairing up Leon Draisaitl and McDavid on a line to get some goals. They’ve got their lowest scoring average ever when together on the same line.
The d-men take turns making nitroglycerine blunders that dynamite the team’s chances of winning on many nights.
coach 10 games
3. All this adds up to the team’s number of Grade A shots for being at five-year regular season low, just 13.1 Grade A shots per game, and the teams number of Grade A shots against being at a five-year regular season high, 13.7 Grade A shots against per game. Edmonton has’t had a negative Grade A shot differential since the Decade of Darkness, but here we are, -0.6 Grade A shots per game, and -0.2 goals per game.
When Jay Woodcroft was fired after 13 games in the fall of 2023, the team was at -1.0 goals per game, which is significantly worse than the -0.2 we’re seeing just now, but anything in negative territory is worrisome, especially as the team’s play, structure and process is also wonky, as seen by that -0.6 Grade A shots per game.
4. In the end, McDavid and Draisaitl are still in their hockey primes, as is Ryan Nugent-Hopkins evidently, along with Evan Bouchard, Brett Kulak, Darnell Nurse, Trent Frederic, Jack Roslovic, Jake Walman, Andrew Mangiapane, Vasily Podkolzin, Stuart Skinner, Noah Philp, David Tomasek, Ty Emberson and others. This isn’t yet an old team, nor is it a young team. It’s a team in it’s hockey prime.
No doubt there will be plenty of thrilling games and moments from the Oilers this year. We had one last night when Evan Bouchard wired a stretch pass to send in Leon Draisaitl to score.
I’ll take that play as a good omen that Drance and Filipovic are correct in their positive assessment.
At the Cult of Hockey
LEAVINS: Edmonton Oilers claw back to earn a single point in Vancouver: Cult of Hockey Player Grades
LEAVINS: You miss 100% of the shots you never take – 9 Things.
STAPLES: Kraken solve the Oilers 3-2 in Seattle