It was an exciting week of hockey for the Edmonton Oilers and their fans. 3 games, 3 overtime games, a very respectable 2-0-1 record and some upward mobility in the standings. A back-in-form Connor McDavidcollected 8 points including the 1,000th of his career, while Leon Draisaitl mustered 6, including 4 goals to move into a tie for the league lead in that department.
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But it wasn’t all sweetness and light. In each of the 3 games, the Oilers led 2-1 with 10 minutes to play in the third period. Not once could they hold that lead.
- Against the New York Islanders, McDavid added what seemed like an insurance goal just after the midway point, but the Isles fought back with a pair of late ones by Anders Lee against Stuart Skinner including a 6v5 tally to send it to overtime, where Draisaitl salvaged the second point with help from McDavid. Shots on goal: EDM 43 NYI 22.
- Against Nashville, the Oilers somehow ceded a breakaway with under 3 minutes left that depth forward Colin Smith shoveled past Calvin Pickard to again force OT. Once again it was McDavid and Draisaitl to the rescue along with Darnell Nurse who finished a dazzling three-way passing play to seal the deal. Shots on goal: EDM 34 NSH 23.
- In Toronto, the 2-1 lead turned to a 3-2 deficit during a minute of excruciatingly bad hockey, resulting in goals by Matthew Knies and Bobby McMann. This time the offensive heroics came in the 59th minute, when with Skinner on the bench for a sixth attacker McDavid set up Draisaitl to tie the game and send it to overtime. But the overtime period itself ended quickly, and badly, when Mitch Marner of the Maple Leafs stopped the Oilers stars on a 2-on-1 rush, took the puck up ice and beat Skinner with an angled shot to decide it. Shots on goal: EDM 30 TOR 22.
The Oilers gave up 9 goals in the 3 games, with 5 of the 9 coming in the back half of the third period and another in overtime (combined 5:05).
Big saves? Yeah, no. By our count here at the Cult of Hockey, the Oilers yielded 5 Grade A shots down the stretch in those third periods. All 5 went in. Pickard did stop 1 such shot in OT vs. the Preds, while Skinner faced just 1 shot in 2 overtime frames, by Marner.
In fairness to the goaltenders, several of these goals came on glaring defensive mistakes. Not much excuse for yielding breakaways with games on the line, as happened in each of the last 2 games. But each time, a depth forward scored rather easily on the play. As the old saying goes, “a @#$%^&* save would be nice!”
This one by McMann stands out. It started with a bad bounce when McDavid’s pass caught Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s skate and caromed into the neutral zone. The problem was magnified when Evan Bouchard was slow to recognize the danger, and Mattias Ekholm simply couldn’t match McMann’s blazing speed. But Skinner was part of the problem too. Note how McMann starts in the faceoff circle in his own end and somehow catches up to the puck at the hash marks in Edmonton territory, not 15 feet away from Skinner, who wound up caught in no man’s land outside of his crease for an easy deke and finish. Far too passive on a sequence calling for proactive intervention.
Then there was Marner’s game winner, where the gifted forward burst down the right wing, sold “high glove” on Skinner before beating the beleaguered netminder just above the pad on the stick side. Note how Skinner is deep in his crease, how his catching glove comes up and, crucially, his right knee drops just before Marner sifts a (perfect) shot right over the lowered pad, off the post and in.
All credit to Marner, that was a brilliant play at both ends of the sheet. But as the old saying goes…
The gamble in goal
The Oilers are subject to the same $88.5 million salary cap that applies to (most) other teams around the NHL. They are blessed with brilliant top end talent, but of course it doesn’t come for free. Moreover, Ken Holland left the franchise with a number of long-term contracts at significant cap hit with movement restrictions that leave previous little manoeuvring room. Some dead cap in there as well, notably in Holland’s one big swing at resolving the goaltending situation in the wake of Mike Smith’s departure after three seasons of cap friendly performance. Holland’s choice Jack Campbell didn’t pan out, his contract was bought out this past summer, and now merely adds to the payroll without helping the situation in the blue paint.
Meanwhile, interim GM Jeff Jackson prioritized adding depth to the forward ranks on Jul 01 with the additions of Viktor Arvidsson and Jeff Skinner along with a late extension to Adam Henrique that collectively charged another $10 million to the cap.
One outcome of these circumstances is a tiny cap budget for goaltending this season:
This calculated from the top two active goalies on each club (omitting the exceptional case of Carey Price, whose playing days appear to be over even as his massive contract carries on). Edmonton ranks near the bottom here, having allotted just 4% of their overall cap to the position. Their goalie cap of $3.6 million is less than a quarter that of the highest club, the (ahem) Florida Panthers.
That management was confident to do so hinged on the prior performance of Stu Skinner, signed to an excellent extension by Holland partway through his outstanding rookie season. Behind him, the journeyman Pickard, neither man with as many as 150 games of regular season experience in the NHL. Collectively they got the job done in 2023-24 after the shocking waiver of Campbell in early November, and clearly the bet was made this past ofseason that the Oilers would remain solid at the position.
And maybe they will return to that status. But early results in 2024-25 have been unnerving to say the least.
Results through Nov. 16 based on data from Natural Stat Trick are grim, with the Oil ranking 30th league-wide, one of four NHL teams to have allowed over 10 goals more than “expected”. That’s something of a variable formula from one site to the next, although all consistently show Edmonton’s tenders near the bottom of the pack.
One might conclude, “29th highest cap, 30th best performance, stands to reason.” But the expectation was that Skinner in particular would overperform his pact, as indeed he has done the past couple of seasons.
In two seasons as the #1 man, Skinner started a whopping 105 games, and held opponents to 2 goals or fewer in over half of them. So far in the new season, however, that has happened just twice in a dozen starts. His goals-against average is down by over half a goal from each of his prior three NHL campaigns. My personal expectation has always been (and remains) that he will recover the form that he showed for long stretches in past seasons, but by results and by eye there is no sign today of an imminent turnaround. And as the season deepens into its second month, there’s cause for concern.
On the individual level, analytics site Money Puck has Skinner at the very bottom of the pack of 75 NHL goalies to have played to far this season in terms of Goals Saved (Below) Expected. Shown above in inverse order; original source is here. Other goalers have worse results on a rate (per 60) basis, but the issue here is that none of them has seen as much action as Skinner because most of them are backups, or have played their way into that role.
Again, it’s not all Skinner, nor indeed just the goaltending tandem. The players in front of them have committed some whoppers at unfortunate times, even as the team as a whole has produced fine underlying numbers, ranking third in the league for fewest xGA/60 as per NST.
A third analyst, JFreshHockey, has both Oilers goaltenders in the undesirable lower-left quadrant, with Pickard showing especially poorly here.
Ultimately, the price is paid in the standings. Yet a fourth site, hockeyviz.com, estimates the Oilers have dropped about 6 standings points due to netminding deficiencies.
The Oilers’ position at the extreme lower left of the dashed line tells us those lost points are largely deserved based on performance to date.
It’s a difficult problem without an easy solution, especially for a team that is tight to the cap. It’s not as if the Oilers are apt to grab the next available goalie off the waiver wire, namely (checks notes) Jack Campbell, waived Sunday by Detroit.
As things stand today, no fewer than 8 Oilers forwards and 4 defencemen have a higher cap hit than does the #1 goalie, who ranks #42 among NHL stoppers in that department. The bet clearly was that it’s a value contract, and that the player would outperform it as he did a year ago in both regular season and playoffs.
Alas, the new season has not gone smoothly. We wrote just last week that Skinner appeared rattled after allowing a late, though meaningless, goal in Vancouver, concluding:
- his game this early season has been a “half bubble off plumb”. No doubt it’s been frustrating for player and fans alike, and we maybe saw signs of that on Saturday. But his past history suggests he will find his groove sooner than later, and with it his trademark even keel.
That remains not just the hope but the expectation, though some signs of progress would surely be welcome. Best guess here is that coach Kris Knoblauch will start Pickard in Montreal on Monday, Skinner in Ottawa Tuesday, and whichever one performs better when the Oilers host Minnesota on Thursday.
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