It could just be coincidence, in this case a repeated coincidence.
Or it could be the annual late season imperative to buckle down in preparation for the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Or it could be that the defencemen on the Edmonton Oilers are all now relatively healthy for the first time this year.
But what we’re finally seeing in the past five games is the best run of play from Edmonton’s defencemen this year, and it coincides with Paul Coffey returning to coach the group after the Olympic break.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen such a bump in group performance under Coffey. Almost every Oilers single d-man improved his play after Coffey took over as their coach early in the 2023-24 season.
I’ll suggest he’s done it again, and that this Edmonton defence is now finally playing at the level that was expected of them at the start of this 2025-26 season.
Evan Bouchard has been out-of-this-world great for more than two months and is finally getting the Norris Trophy recognition he deserves. Mattias Ekholm just came off a run of his best hockey as an Oiler. Darnell Nurse has been up and down all year but has been bolstered by new partner Connor Murphy. Murphy plays a nasty, disciplined game that the Oilers had been missing. He’s has been trending up as he settles in with his new team.
Meanwhile, in these past five games, Ty Emberson and Jake Walman just played their best hockey of the year, with Walman’s sudden turnaround from injured underperforming to ace attacking d-man most remarkable.
The group is now going so well that they’re coming close to meeting the mark set by a number of hockey stats analysts, who saw great things for the Oilers defence heading into the 2025-26 season.
Pre-season optimism
In the pre-season, TSN stats analyst and hockey writer Travis Yost placed the defence of the Edmonton Oilers in the NHL’s top tier, along with Colorado, Carolina, Dallas and Ottawa.
Said Yost of the Oilers: “The goaltending can terrify you on any given night but a key reason why the Oilers have emerged as perennial Stanley Cup contenders – OK, setting aside the two-headed monster of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl – is a deepening of skill and talent on the blueline. You need puck movers capable of igniting an attack with this collection of forwards, and Edmonton has that in spades – now featuring one of the best trade deadline acquisitions of the 2024-25 season in Jake Walman.”
Yost’s analysis followed the work of another strong stats analyst, Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic, who did valuations of players on all 32 NHL teams (essentially translating each player’s individual performance into a dollar amount) and found that the Oilers have the most high-performing and valuable d-man unit in the entire NHL.
Of the Top 60 highest performing d-men in the NHL, the Oilers had four, as per Luszczyszyn’s model, with Evan Bouchard ranked seventh, Mattias Ekholm 16th, Jake Walman 29th and Darnell Nurse 52nd. Top ranked was Colorado’s Cale Makar at $15.4 million. Luszczyszyn valued Bouchard at $12.8 million, Ekholm, $9.8 million, Walman, $7.9 million, Nurse, $6.5 million, Brett Kulak, $3.9 million and Ty Emberson at $2.5 million.
Early season blues
Things went bad for Walman early this year, as he suffered a pre-season injury that kept him out six games in October, then a lower-body injury that saw him out seven weeks from late November to mid-January.
Things went also went bad in Edmonton’s nets, which meant the team felt compelled to trade away Stuart Skinner for Tristan Jarry in mid-December, with Kulak, who had been struggling early this year in Edmonton, also having to go to make the deal work under the NHL’s salary cap.
Evan Bouchard got off to an awful start in October, as did Nurse and Emberson, with Ekholm also playing weak hockey by his own standards. They all picked up their games in November, but each one had at least one more defensive slump, with Nurse up and down all year. He’s had three solid 10-game segments and four poor ones.
All this can be seen in their individual Grade A shots plus-minus at even strength.
To understand these numbers for d-men, any defenceman who breaks even on Grade A shots, helping to create as many at even strength as he makes mistakes on, is playing at a high level.
I’d break it down as: +0.5 Grade A shots per game, Norris Trophy candidate; +0.1 to +0.5 per game, All-Star game candidate; -0.5 to -0.0, Top 4 NHL d-man; -0.8 to -0.5, adequate NHL d-man; -0.9 to -1.0, struggling NHLer; below -1.0 likely to be benched, demoted or traded.
In the last five games, Walman, +1.00 Grade A shots per game, and Bouchard, +0.76 per game, have been playing at the highest level, Emberson, +0.44, is coming through like he never has before, Murphy, -0.32, looks like a solid Top 4 d-man, with Nurse, -0.60, and Ekholm, -0.65, just below that, given the high level of competition they face.
As a group, the Oilers d-men are for now meeting the high standard set by Yost and Luszczyszyn.
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Collectively, the six d-men are at +0.06 Grade A shots plus-minus per game in the last five games, starting with the 5-2 loss to Tampa. That’s their best mark this year. In the first 10 games of the year they were -1.03, which had me wondering in early November if Coffey wasn’t needed then to rectify things. They improved to -0.4 from games 11 to 20, then got up to -0.19 per game in games 21-30, before dropping back down to -0.81 in games 31-40.
Since that time they’ve been OK as a group, though Walman and Spencer Stastney kept on struggling big time, with Nurse his up-and-down self.
But the entire group is getting it done right now. If they can continue at this level of play — and as a group they were very good in the 2025 playoff run — Edmonton’s Stanley Cup hopes will be much improved.
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