Game Day 40: Edmonton at Boston
It hasn’t been the sort of season that Jeff Skinner expected, nor that Edmonton Oilers fans expected from him. The proven sniper was signed on the first day of free agency to considerable fanfare, a veteran of 1,000 NHL regular season games who had yet to make a single appearance in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
It had been his misfortune to play extended stretches with NHL franchises in times of fallow: eight years with Carolina Hurricanes in the years before they became an NHL power, then the next six with the ever-down-and-out Buffalo Sabres. Skinner scored plenty of goals but his teams didn’t win plenty of games.
At the end of June, the Sabres bit the bullet and bought out the final three years of the 8-year, $72 million deal the two parties had signed after Skinner’s first season in Buffalo, a threshold year in which he’d soared to a career high 40 goals. Things went south in a hurry as the normally-productive sniper fell to 14 goals, then just 7 in the two seasons that followed. He recovered nicely with campaigns of 35 and 33 goals, but when his production slid to “just” 24 tallies in 2023-24 — and the Sabres missed the playoffs yet again — the decision was taken to cut the cord. For a day, Skinner was homeless, desperately seeking a new team with some history, and prospects, of success.
Enter Jeff Jackson and the Edmonton Oilers. The Stanley Cup finalists were themselves searching for some depth scoring that might take them over the top. The two sides agreed on a one-year deal at the cut rate of $3 million, with the player negotiating a no-move clause that would preclude his new club from dealing him to a non-playoff squad at the deadline.
Halfway through that one season, things have not been going as planned. Not even close. Skinner struggled to find chemistry with either Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl in limited opportunities, having played less than 15% of his 5v5 time with each. He has found himself down the line-up with a variety of linemates, his ice time dwindling. The man who had averaged 17 minutes per game in both of his prior homes has slipped below 13 minutes a night in Edmonton.
In recent times that trend has become more noticeable. In his first 31 games he played at least 10 minutes in all but one. But over his last seven appearances he’s been in the single digits no fewer than five times. In another contest he was a healthy scratch.
Through 38 GP his boxcar stats are an underwhelming 7-7-14, with his -10 being the poorest on the club. Indeed, it has surely been his problematic defensive game that has has run afoul with coach Kris Knoblauch.
But in the last few games since the benching, there have been some encouraging signs. Consigned to a two different iterations of the fourth line the past two games, Skinner racked up an assist and a goal.
- On Friday against Anaheim he played on a bottom unit with Adam Henrique and Corey Perry, three veteran scorers who among them have scored 1,067 NHL goals… not bad for a fourth line! In that game Skinner got a primary assist on a five-way passing play with a sharp feed to Darnell Nurse, who buried.
- Then on Saturday in Seattle, it was Skinner himself with the nifty finish after being set up by his latest linemates, Kasperi Kapanen and Derek Ryan.
Both games resulted in tight regulation wins for the Oil, with those tallies from down the line-up being key. Despite playing just 9 minutes and change in each, Skinner found a way to be part of the solution and not the problem.
Tonight the Oilers take their road show three time zones to the east all the way to the other coast, where they’ll face the Boston Bruins. Once again Knoblauch has shuffled the lines, with Skinner getting a bump up the depth chart.
Tonight’s line-up
Once again, Skinner is paired with Henrique, himself an underachiever at the offensive end of the sheet this year with just 3 goals and 10 points through 39 games. On the right side is the redoubtable Zach Hyman who changed spots with the red-hot Connor Brown a few games back and dropped from the first line to the third.
It’s a veteran trio. Skinner, 32, leads the way with 1044 NHL games, having made the NHL (and won the Calder Trophy) back in 2010-11 at age 18. Henrique, 34, has 951 regular season games under his belt. Hyman, 32, has the least NHL experience with a still-impressive 614.
All three have a history of scoring. Skinner has amassed 366 goals, Henrique 266. Hyman has 216, fully a quarter of which were scored last season alone. Which makes his own appearance on the third line something of a surprise, presumably a temporary one.
This season both Hyman (1.65 points per 60) and Skinner (1.62) have been middling scorers at 5v5, while Henrique currently ranks last among Oilers forwards with just 0.91 P/60. This from a previously consistent producer who landed between 1.8 and 2.0 P/60 in each of his prior five seasons, mostly in Anaheim but including a solid 1.93 during his 22 games in Edmonton last spring after being acquired at the deadline.
Henrique has morphed from top- to bottom-six forward as an Oiler, so some depression in scoring was to be expected, but nobody foresaw it being cut in half. So he too is under the microscope as Knoblauch looks for a combination that can produce consistently against lower-tier competition.
This latest trio has previously played just 6 minutes together (1-0 goals) so their chemistry as a line is a mystery box at this moment. But with the season reaching its midway point, all three thirty-something veterans have a point to prove. And, one hopes, points to score.
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