If you’re an Edmonton Oilers fan, you probably started this season with a very hopeful outlook. Connor McDavid was coming off an astounding 153-point, 64-goal season, a point total that hasn’t been seen in the NHL for 27 years; and with his point total increasing like clockwork there was no reason to expect it wouldn’t do so again. Leon Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Zach Hyman, and Darnell Nurse all had career years in points, the first three with huge increases. The year ended on a second round exit by the Oilers, which was a step back from the conference finals they had seen the season before, but they lost to the eventual Stanley Cup Champions, the Vegas Golden Knights.
Now picture yourself approximately two months ago, if you’re thinking of a time that you called in sick, didn’t leave bed, and found yourself weeping, seemingly inexplicably, when you saw the colours orange and blue together, then you’re thinking of the right time. On November 22nd the Oilers lost to the Carolina Hurricanes giving them a points percentage of .306, good for (or rather, bad for) 30th in the league. That’s effectively the very bottom of the barrel and would have been pre-expansion.
Now, Kris Knoblauch was hired on November 13 and for a week and a half after that, it seemed like it wasn’t going to make any difference at all. Much to the contrary, the Oilers have lost only three games since that loss to Carolina. They are 21–3–0 since then and are currently riding a 14-game win streak, the longest winning streak of any Canadian team ever. As an Oilers fan, you couldn’t possibly have hoped for a more complete turnaround to the season.
Let’s take a look at some stats along the way. Note, the stats in the article are accurate as of Tuesday, January 23 from NHL.com.
The magnitude of the Oilers’ turnaround
Essentially every team stat in the game has improved over that time, which is only to be expected. The following line graph shows point percentage, goals for/game played, goals against/game played, power play%, penalty kill%, shots/game, and shots against/game since the beginning of the season.
The data has been normalized (made to fit between 0 and 1) so as to see when and how drastically each stat has changed over time. However, since the data has been normalized, when the data hits the 0 or 1 mark, that only indicates a maximum or minimum at that point in time for the Oilers, it does not mean that they are leading or trailing the league in these stats.
Normalization in this case allows multiple statistics to be compared to each other all at once and gives a sense of where the team is trending. In the chart:
- Points % = yellow,
- Goals For/game = orange,
- Goals against/game = blue,
- Power Play% = green,
- Penalty kill% = red,
- Shots/game = pink,
- shots against/game = purple.
- The warmer colours signify stats that you’d rather see higher, and the colder colours signify stats that are better when lower.
Now this probably looks like an awful mess, and it is, but there are some points I would like to draw your attention to. First of all is that it looks like an awful mess on the left but is much cleaner on the right. This shows that the stats that you want to see higher are trending in the right direction and the stats you want to see lower are doing the same. An apt analogy for the chaos at the beginning of the season.
The Knoblauch line
Second, is the line labelled “The Knoblauch Line”, which represents the day that Kris Knoblauch was hired as head coach. At first glance, it appears, as it did to all of us when it actually happened, that the day Knoblauch was hired was the day that all the Oilers stats started to turn around. It seems to be the point where the two groups of stats start to trend in the right direction, and the graph moves from chaos to clarity.
However, even though the Oilers started winning not long after Kris Knoblauch was hired, they were in fact trending toward their current dominance before Kris took the reins. If you look closely, and at each line individually, you will see that they each started moving the right way briefly before Knoblauch’s hiring.
Summing up the Oilers’ first half
It’s impossible to say whether or not those trends would have continued under the leadership of Jay Woodcroft, and I certainly do not want to take anything away from Kris Knoblauch, who has had a truly tremendous start to his NHL head coaching career.
That being said, a coach being hired in the middle of one season, turning that season around promptly, and following it up with a return to mediocrity is a hockey story as old as time. The culture change shocks the players into working harder, and the new beginning fills fans and players alike with optimism.
My personal opinion though is that, like the old adage “you can’t keep a good man down” a good team will find a way to turn things around. McDavid and Draisaitl are too skilled, the Oilers are too deep, and Stuart Skinner is showing that he is too good to suffer in the dregs of the league for long.
If my rambling is (justifiably) not enough proof for you though, the Oilers are, in the NHL, 4th in GF/GP, 10th in GA/GP, 6th in power play percentage, 9th in penalty kill percentage, 2nd in shots/game, and 4th in shots against/GP; and that’s not bad for a team that started 2–9–1.
Photo by Curtis Comeau/Icon Sportswire
