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These are heady days for the Edmonton Oilers. The local NHL club has been winning game after game in a winning streak that has gone on for 6 solid weeks now. It’s destined to last for at least 1 more, given the players have recently gone their separate ways for a well-earned 9-day vacation that incorporates the All-Star break.
The club has joined some exclusive company along the way, as 1 of 5 NHL squads to win at least 15 straight, and 1 of just 3 to play an entire calendar month without dropping so much as a point (10 games minimum). The former remains very much an active streak, while the latter is a done deal; there are no more games in January, which finished 11-0-0.
In the larger string, the Oilers did much of the heavy lifting in late December. They won their last 5 games of 2023, all of them on the road, including sweeps of their first 2 back-to-backs of the season. Among their victims, the New York Rangers, at the time first overall in the NHL with a .750 points percentage. A week later, it was the Los Angeles Kings, flying high in first place in the Western Conference and third overall by points percentage at .688 (and never the same since).
That prologue aside, we’ll spend the rest of this post digging into that “perfect” month of January. 11 games, 11 wins.
Needless to say the critics/haters have been out in force, scoffing about how soft Edmonton’s schedule has been. They certainly have a point. So too do Oil fans who fire back that a team can only beat the opposition they happen to be facing that night. Which their club has been doing. Repeatedly.
Let’s dig into that January slate, which included 7 home games, 4 on the road:
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What jumps off the page immediately is its regularity. No games at all on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, just a regular repetition of Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday with one open date on Thu Jan 04. The Oilers had at least a day off before every game they played, and were better rested than their opponent for many of them. The spacing of the games allowed Edmonton to start their #1 goaltender, Stu Skinner, for all but 2 in which backup Calvin Pickard spelled him off, with gusto.
The second thing that hits home is the consistent low scores of those contests. Note in particular the 4 road games, where the Oilers scored just 7 non-empty-net goals in regulation, yet somehow found a way to win all 4!
The squad was also healthy. The same 6 defencemen started every game. Up front, depth forwards Sam Gagner and Dylan Holloway were out to start the month, though ultimately both returned and were inserted into the line-up, consigning injury recalls Adam Erne and James Hamblin back to the AHL. The group was further buttressed late in the month by the signing of in-season free agent Corey Perry.
As for those opponents? Let’s have a quick review of where each ranked in the overall standings on their respective game nights, again using points percentage:
- Philadelphia Flyers, 11th overall, .597
- Ottawa Senators, 29th, .412
- Chicago Blackhawks, 31st, .325
- Detroit Red Wings, 18th, .550
- Montreal Canadiens, 25th, .488, 3rd game in 4 nights
- Toronto Maple Leafs, 12th, .610, 3rd game in 4 nights
- Seattle Kraken, 22nd, .534, 3rd game in 4 nights
- Calgary Flames, 22nd, .522
- Columbus Blue Jackets, 29th, .411
- Chicago again, still 31st, .313, 3rd game in 4 nights
- Nashville Predators, 16th, .552
Just 3 of the 11 January opponents were in a playoff spot on game night; 7 were 22nd or below; on average roughly 22nd place. 4 of those teams were playing a 3rd game in 4 nights, a challenge the Oilers never faced all month.
NHL schedules don’t often fall so kindly as Edmonton’s in January. So the eternal nay-sayers do have a point. But that’s 1 more point than the Oilers have dropped in the last 6 weeks. The club has zero reason to apologize for winning, winning, winning.
Reminder: the NHL doesn’t give points for artistic impression, just for W’s.
What particularly stands out is the way they’ve been getting the job done. A couple of blowout wins in late December, but throughout January the formula was excellent goaltending, solid team defence, terrific penalty-killing, and oh yeah, some timely scoring. But those games were won far more by goal suppression than by goal production. When the goals did come, they were of type “timely”, especially in a run of 3 straight games where the Oilers trailed in the final 20 only to pull off a comeback win each time.
January by the numbers
Let’s start with this nugget: through Jan 30, the 10 different opponents the Oilers beat this month have won a combined 60 (sixty) of 130 games in January. That sums to 0 for 11 against the Oilers, 60-59 against everybody else. Hmm.
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3 games remain on the NHL schedule on Wednesday night so these aren’t quite final rankings, though most of them are unassailable.
Goals For/Against
- 37 Goals For = 3.36 GF/GP, 9th
- 14 Goals Against = 1.27 GA/GP, 1st
- +23 Goal Differential = +2.09/GP, 1st
Goal production was fairly mediocre, especially for a team that led the league in this category by a considerable margin in 2022-23. On the other hand, goal suppression was off-the-charts fantastic in a month where just 2 other NHL clubs (Winnipeg, 1.75; Buffalo, 2.09) were within a goal of Edmonton’s remarkable average.
Special Teams
- 10 powerplay goals for in 29 opportunites = 34.5%, 1st
- 1 (one!) powerplay goal against in 33 opportunities = 97.0%, 1st
Best in the league in both categories. Next question.
Individual stats
- Leading scorer: Connor McDavid, 19 points, T-7th; 1.73 P/GP, 5th (min 6 GP)
- Leading goal scorer: Zach Hyman, 9 goals, T-8th; 0.82 G/GP, 6th
- Top plus (forwards): Leon Draisaitl, +12, 1st; Connor McDavid, +11, T-2nd
- Leading defence scorer: Evan Bouchard, 7 points, T-29th; 0.64 P/GP, 25th
- Top plus (d-men): Evan Bouchard: +11, 3rd
- Best goals against average: Stu Skinner, 1.33, 1st
- Best save percentage: Stu Skinner, .953, 1st
Just scratching the surface here with boxcar stats and similar, but the same theme prevails. Oilers doing OK but not exactly crushing it offensively, but doing extremely well indeed on the goal differential front and lights out in the pipes. The latter of course reflects on the whole team, not just the netminder who gets credited with the dazzling numbers.
What does it all mean?
Hate to break it to you, but the Oilers are not as good as their record over the last 6 weeks indicates. On the flip side, they are clearly not as bad as their record in the first 6 weeks.
What is impressive is how quickly they have been able to overcomes that horrendous early deficit. Their first 8-game winning streak starting in late November brought them right back to the pack. Their second and third 8-game win streaks — which happened to be contiguous to each other — have put them in an extremely comfortable position for the fundamental goal of qualifying for the playoffs. Again using points percentage as our guide, their current mark of .656 ranks 2nd in the Pacific, 5th in the Western Conference, 7th overall.
Nice to have that cushion when the club enters a much more difficult schedule after the break.
- 12 games in the last 24 days of February, including the Golden Knights, Bruins, Stars and 2 against the Kings. 8 of the 12 are on the road, with 2 pairs of back-to-backs,
- 15 contests in March, notably the Bruins, Avalanche, Jets, and Kings. 3 more back-to-backs.
- 10 games in just 18 days in April, 5 of them in the last week. Among the opposition are the Stars, Golden Knights, Canucks, and 2 against the Avalanche. 3 back-to-backs in the final 2 weeks, and no such thing as a “rest advantage” at any point.
The good news? That tough closing stretch should contain relatively few and possibly zero “must-win” games, thanks to that solid cushion the Oilers have built up these past couple of months. It’s hugely important that they didn’t merely overtake the pack, but got well out in front of much of it.
The schedule is what it is, with an iron-clad guarantee that all of the top teams will show up eventually. The surest way to playoff qualification is to bank as many points as possible against the rest. The Edmonton Oilers have been doing just that.
