The Edmonton Oilers went as far as a team can go last year without winning the whole show. Stellar regular and post season performances from Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman, and Evan Bouchard pushed the Oilers nearly to immortality. A couple of these names are the usual high producing suspects and the other two are not likely to regress in their current position on the team.
What about some of the other players on the team though? Which players can return to form after a bad year in order to push the Oilers over the line and engrave their names in that legendary silver cup?
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins
It would be very hard to call the season that Ryan Nugent-Hopkins had last year a down year, he scored 18 goals and 67 points which is the third most productive year of his career. However, scoring 67 points looks worse when you put up nearly 40 goals and 104 points the previous year. With the exception of the 104-point season, Nugent-Hopkins has scored 0.74 PPG, a 61-point pace which means that the 104-point season was the outlier, but can Nugent-Hopkins repeat that production?
The most noticeable change in Nugent-Hopkins stats in the 104-point season was his astronomical 18.41% shooting percentage, essentially twice the league average. Excluding that season, his average shooting percentage is 11.08% where last years was 9.84%. This data fits very well with the fact that his individual expected goals (ixG), individual Corsi For (iCF), individual scoring chances for (iSCF), and individual high danger chances for (iHDCF) were all as high or higher the last two years than they ever have been before.
These stats paint the picture of a player who, playing on a offensively dominant line with McDavid and Hyman, has had more chances than ever before the last two years but last year just seemed to be snake-bitten. Last year was one of very few seasons when Nugent-Hopkins scored significantly below his ixG so it would be no surprise if Nugent-Hopkins scored closer to the century mark next year.
Jeff Skinner
Arguably the most exciting of the new Oilers, Jeff Skinner is being paid $3M a year, and two years ago scored 82 points on one of the worst teams in the league. Over his career he has scored 0.67 PPG for an average 55-point pace. His 82-point season came while playing on a line with Alex Tuch and Tage Thompson during Thompson’s breakout season.
This is great news for the Oilers, it means he can put up big numbers with good line-mates. That 82-point season was an increase from his average ixG, iCF, iSCF, and iHDCF, but that’s what good line-mates will do for you—for this reason Viktor Arvidsson is also likely to have a strong season. If Skinner does end up playing with Draisaitl and Arvidsson, as is expected by many, and doesn’t score 25 goals, I will eat my genuine alligator skin boots.
Connor Brown
Connor Brown is probably the most likely to have a bounce back season on the Oilers. The 30-year-old missed almost the entire 2022–23 season with a knee injury, then went most of the 2023–24 season without scoring before finishing the season strong. Most encouraging was his playoff performance though, where he scored at a 26-point pace. This would be almost par for Brown, who has scored an average of 31 points per game in his career.
Browns shooting percentage was only 3.7% last year which is miles down from his 11.3% career average. Combined with the fact that Brown scored four goals but his ixG was 11.44 suggests that he, like Nugent-Hopkins, was suffering from some mysterious bad luck. For this reason, it would not be surprising to see Brown return to a 30 to 40 point season.
Mattias Janmark
Mattias Janmark is statistically in a very similar boat to Brown, they both even had four goals and 12 points in 71 games last year. Janmark is a career 0.38 PPG player, a 31-point pace. Janmark’s shooting percentage also took a major dip to 5.97% from his career average 11% and he had half as many goals as his ixG of 8.6. If he and Brown are given third line minutes all season, then they should have much more productive seasons next year.
The only other candidate for a bounce back season is the newest addition to the team, Vasily Podkolzin. Podkolzin has scored at solid rates and has had a shooting percentage as high as 12.17% when playing with all-star line-mates, but any ice time he sees next season is likely to be on the fourth line. That being said, Podkolzin is a capable scorer and if he spends the whole season with the team then a 25 or better point season shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Photo by Curtis Comeau/Icon Sportswire
