Posted by 
It’s the dog days of summer in the NHL, with precious little of major interest happening around the league. Here in greater Edmonton it’s been radio silence, with the “major” news items being the departure of video coach Jeremy Coupal and the decision of prospect Raphael Lavoie to accept his qualifying offer rather than the expected NHL minimum for his second contract. The major RFA’s, Evan Bouchard and Ryan McLeod, find themselves in an uncomfortable waiting game with The Patient One, GM Ken Holland who made most of his moves on either Day Two of the Draft or Day One of free agency.
For those of statistical bent who can’t quite forget about the game for the summer, July and August is a good time to take a deeper dive on the big picture. Last week we examined the Oilers NHL-leading offence and middle-of-the-pack defence in a pair of related posts that ran the gamut from the club’s 44-year/43-season NHL history in both GF and GA to a quarter-by-quarter breakdown of the 2022-23 season. A few names were dropped here and there, but we remained focused on team outcomes throughout. In the next couple of posts, we’ll start to fold in internal results, with a particular emphasis on the bottom six, a perennial sore spot which enjoyed a splendid rise to prominence in 2022-23.
But to properly contextualize, let’s first take a different overview of team results over the past five seasons, continuing to focus on Goals For and Against. The solid blue line represents the change in management to Holland in 2019.
Overall results at right are split into just two categories, 5v5 and “special teams” which here is code for “all other manpower situations”. That includes Edmonton’s awesome powerplay which has made an impact on those big green numbers in the middle columns. Consider that over the last four seasons, the Oilers with 257 PPGF have scored 33 more powerplay goals than any other NHL team. (Second-place Colorado’s 224 have come on 104 MORE opportunities, just saying.) Improvements on the penalty kill and more empty net situations when leading than trailing have also led to the major surpluses in specialty situations, which collectively account for a little over 20% of all ice time.
For the first three of those seasons, any 5v5 outscoring came from Edmonton’s top players doing a bit more damage when they were on the ice than their opponents did with them off it. Make no mistake, the club has been skating uphill in those situations for years. But that changed in a very big way this past season.
In the past, we’ve used the WOWY (With Or Without You) system identifying Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl as the top sixers and “both off” as defining the bottom six. But in truth McD-Drai play together on many nights, when “both off” more defines the bottom nine than six. So this time we’ve included Ryan Nugent-Hopkins as a third top-sixer. With extremely rare exceptions, two of those stars play on one top-six line and the third on the other. When all three are off, well, it hasn’t been good. Until recently.
These numbers courtesy from Natural Stat Trick‘s marvelous Line Tool. As before, 2018-19 was bad across the board. By Holland’s first season, the big guys were back to outscoring, but the bottom six continued to get torched. Just look at those horrible goal shares well south of 40% four years in a row, 2018-22. And 40% goal share might well be hockey’s Mendoza Line, below which you can’t possibly be helping the ball club no matter how tough the zone starts and comp or how nifty you may be with the leather.
But look what happened in 2022-23. Like magic, that goal share leapt beyond 40%. Sprang over 45%. Soared above 50%. And sailed clear of 55%.
And just like that, Edmonton’s rank and file players were producing a better GF:GA rate than the stars, this after being close to 20% in arrears over the previous years. Put another way, an annual sore spot to the tune of -20 real goals suddenly transmogrified to the range of +10.
The transition of the team numbers can be readily seen in the individual on-ice stats. In each of the five seasons I tried to identify those players who played the least with the top stars while omitting guys like James Neal, Zack Kassian, Jesse Puljujrvi and Kailer Yamamoto who were at least semi-regulars with McDavid and/or Draisaitl. I chose six or seven guys from each of the listed seasons as “bottom sixers”, listing their 5v5 ice time and goal shares, and adding a little colour to make it pop:
Nevermind the numbers for a moment and look simply at the progression of names. This Oilers fan would choose the 2022-23 group seven days out of seven. There are plenty of elements among them: size, speed, spirit, smarts, skill, scoring. Six of the eight scored double digit goals, playing bottom six minutes with zero (functional) powerplay time. It was easily the best bottom six Edmonton had iced since 2016-17, not coincidentally the last similarly-identified group to come out ahead on goal share.
It’s not that Holland and his predecessors for that matter haven’t tinkered with the bottom six every summer, it’s just that finding the right formula is damned tricky. Indeed, in the current situation the bottom six is about the only place Holland can tinker, with the rest of his line-up largely filled by guaranteed contracts. Some of his players (Bouchard, McLeod) have earned raises Holland will be hard-pressed to provide. Others (Kostin, Bjugstad) earned raises which they have already received in other cities, simply because the Oilers can’t afford them.
Another way of looking at it is that Kostin and Bjugstad provided a lot more value at a combined cap hit of $1.2 million last season than they possibly can at a combined $4.1 million to their new teams.
The sad thing about value contracts is that they tend to expire sooner than the team might like. In some situations the better solution is to let the player move on than to overpay him to stay, a.k.a. the Alex Chiasson model.
In this case Bjugstad was always a rental on an expiring deal, and any thoughts of extending the 6’6 right shot centre a pipe dream. Meanwhile Kostin’s one-year league-min pact had “Show Me” written all over it, appropriate since he signed it in Missouri. The Oilers did manage to get a useful season from Kostin, moreover traded his rights to facilitate offloading Kailer Yamamoto’s $3.1 million pact with zero retention.
Yamamoto has already been replaced by Connor Brown. And Holland extended useful vets Derek Ryan, Mattias Janmark who not only didn’t get a raise, they took a significant pay cut to stay. The two of them combined have a lower cap hit than either Bjugstad or Kostin.
But the departure of those latter two means that Holland is once again searching for some low-cost players who can get the job done. Can Lane Pederson be the next Nick Bjugstad? Drake Caggiula the new Klim Kostin? Hmmm.
The better way is internal growth. Talented youngsters Dylan Holloway and Raphael Lavoie are next in line, their cheap (if not quite cheap enough in Lavoie’s case) contracts already on the books for ’23-24. Now they have to prove they are up to the challenge, with the bar set significantly higher.
