Edmonton Oilers confirmed their place among NHL’s elite teams in 2024

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Happy New Year! May it be better than the last.

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In the singular case of the Edmonton Oilers, it needs to be a single win better than what transpired in a remarkable 2024. The Oilers came oh so close to winning the grand prize during a thrilling postseason run that saw the squad knock off three strong Western Conference opponents and stave off elimination no fewer than five times before falling a single goal short of Florida Panthers in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. It was a nine-week dance between the agony and the ecstasy whose dial landed on the former in the very last act.

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Just 3½ months later, the puck dropped on a new season which is setting the stage for the spring to come.

I find New Year’s Day a useful time to take stock. Dividing the statistical information by calendar year as opposed to by NHL season yields a equivalent chunk of games per team and across the league, just split a little differently. Among other things, it gives an added opportunity to analyze trends. Is the team doing better, worse, or holding its own?

Preseason aside, the Oilers played 110 hockey games in 2024, 85 of them in the regular season plus another 25 in the playoffs. We’ll largely focus here on those regular season games, of which 48 were played in 2023-24 plus another 37 in 2024-25, then have a little extra fun at the end of the post.

Team performance

Let’s start with the exact same basket of stats that we considered in an equivalent post one year ago today covering the 78 regular season contests the Oilers played in calendar 2023. Given teams across the league played slightly differing numbers of games, we will again use points percentages and per-game averages to balance the scales, all from the Team Summary page at NHL.com.

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Wins and losses

•  Record: 85 GP, 53-24-8, 114 points, .671 Pts% = 3rd in NHL

This represents a slight uptick from 2023, when the Oilers’ 48-22-8 mark yielded a .667 Pts% that ranked 6th in the league.

Offence

• Goals For / GP : 3.44 = 5th
• Shots For / GP : 32.9 = 1st
• Powerplay % : 25.6 = 5th
• Net PP% (PPGF – SHGA) : 24.2% = 3rd

Production was down fairly sharply from a league-leading 3.97 goals per game in 2023, even as the Oilers continued to hang in the top 5 in all categories. One anomaly is that Shots For actually dropped from 34.5 per game to 32.9, even as the Oil soared from 5th to 1st in that department, clearly reflecting a decline in shots on goal (or maybe in how they are counted) around the league.

Powerplay production fell off somewhat from its record-setting peak yet remained among the best in the league.

Defence

• Goals Against / GP : 2.72 = 6th
• Shots Against / GP : 27.3 = 5th
• Penalty Kill % : 78.7% = 20th
• Net PK% : 80.9% = 19th

The 2024 version of the Oil shaved over 10% from their Goals Against, a major step forward. In the process they moved from literally middle of the pack (tied for 16th) into the top quartile of the league for defensive performance. This has clearly been a major focus of Kris Knoblauch since he took the helm in November of 2023, with the roughly commensurate drop in offensive output a cost of doing business. In general, the Oilers have been playing a more controlled, tempered brand of hockey under Knoblauch.

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This was achieved despite an uneven performance by the penalty kill unit which ran hot or cold for weeks at a time. Of course these regular-season numbers do not reflect the phenomenal performance of that unit in the playoffs, when the Oilers allowed just 4 goals and scored 3 themselves in 70 shorthanded situations.

Net

• Goal differential / GP : +0.72 = 6th
• Shot differential / GP : +5.6 = 2nd
• PP% + PK% : 104.3% = 8th
• Net ST % : 105.1% = 5th

Strong showing across the board here, even as goal differential actually dropped a smidge. Net special teams fell from a spectacular 113% in 2023 to a still-solid 105% in 2024.

Overall the Oilers ranked in the top quarter in 11 of the 13 categories shown, with the only hiccup being on the penalty kill which endured difficult stretches in both (half) seasons.

Turning now to individual performance, in which we will again consider fundamental stats provided by NHL.com without digging in to underlying analytics:

Goal

Small but measurable improvement recorded by starter Stuart Skinner, who has been receiving almost exactly two-thirds of the workload in the regular season including most of the “big” games. His save percentage bumped up by 4 basis points, his goals against down by 0.18. The hockey club posted a .681 points percentage on his watch, also a slight upgrade from .670 a year ago.

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Veteran Calvin Pickard has settled in nicely to the backup role, starting one game of every three and doing well with those opportunities. His GAA of 2.41 is impressive indeed, even as it reflects to a degree the somewhat lesser calibre of opponent he generally faces. His Pts% of .648 is very satisfactory for a player of his role and cap hit.

Defencemen

Evan Bouchard continued his progression into a top role on the blueline, indeed the top role if we use time on ice as our guide. That’s a nuanced discussion in that Bouchard soaks up lots of extra time on the powerplay, reflected in his production numbers in that column. But he also led the blueline in even-strength offence with significant outscoring chops.

For the second year in a row Mattias Ekholm led the entire club in traditional plus/minus with an eye-popping +50, an impressive encore to the +37 he recorded in just 10 months as an Oiler in 2023. All-rounder Darnell Nurse delivered the standard 30+ points that we have come to expect in any 80-game block with most of that coming at even strength.

Brett Kulak has moved up the depth chart to supplant the departed Cody Ceci, even as his per-game production stats are a little lower. Deceptive number here is his average ice time, which is up 10% from the 16:00 he averaged in 2023 but which has trended far higher in the current season. In essence, these are blended stats of a #5 D in the closing months of 2023-24 and a full-blown #4 today.

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A couple of question marks remain on the lower part of the list, where newcomers Troy Stecher and Ty Emberson have taken the reins from the departed Ceci, Vincent Desharnais and Philip Broberg (not shown because he played just 2 regular season games as an Oiler in 2024). An important consideration is that departed trio has a combined cap hit of very nearly $10 million while the newcomers each come in under $1 million. It has been a fascinating study to observe the coaching staff try to cobble together a working sextet while clearly awaiting some sort of reinforcement/s at the trade deadline.

Forwards

Long list here, which includes three departed players as well as Evander Kane who has yet to play a minute of hockey in 2024-25. The other 13 are on the active roster.

Standing out as usual are the fabulous duo of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl who have been driving the offensive bus for this club for the better part of a decade now and continue to do so. Their offensive production was fairly steady year-over-year, no mean feat given their super-elite baseline performance. Each enjoyed an impressive rise in his plus/minus, especially Draisaitl who soared from +2 in 2023 to +47 a year later, tops among all forwards. Indeed, he was #1 in that department among all forwards league-wide, with McDavid #2.

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(I would make the case that for all its imperfections, plus/minus really underscores how the Oilers are effectively a powerful five-man unit of McDavid, Draisaitl, Hyman, Ekholm and Bouchard, four of whom ranked in the top five in plus league-wide with Hyman a solid 11th. Whereas almost every other skater on the team was in the single digits, close to break-even be it plus or minus. The observed strategy of “let’s hold the fort and let the big guys win it for us” is surely reflected here.)

Proven vets Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins continue to provide the next layer of scoring, even as RNH has seen a worrisome decline in production from 92 points in 2023 to just 54 in 2024, with both even-strength and powerplay scoring being impacted.

Below them Kane saw his own output slashed, largely due to injury which affected first his performance, then his availability. Warren Foegele is missed as a mid-level scorer as his would-be replacement Viktor Arvidsson adapts to his new team and deals with injury issues of his own. Indeed, other than Kane’s 20 points in 44 games, virtually all of the other depth forwards below the Powerplay Four are producing at a rate of a point every 3 or 4 games.

Utility forward Derek Ryan stands out with just 8 points and -10 in 67 games, this after chalking up 19 points and +13 in 77 games in calendar 2023. My eyes are telling me that time is running out for this highly-respected vet after many years of defying both the odds and Father Time, and these numbers are saying similar.

Individual performance vs. league

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Saw this fascinating item the other day that got me thinking about combined scoring for regular season and playoffs (long a topic of personal interest), and decided to dig into exactly that for the 2024 calendar year.

Here for your reading enjoyment are the top five in goals, assists and points in each of the regular season, playoffs, and the combination of the two.

Worth noting that of the 45 names shown here (2 ties omitted), the Oilers are represented no fewer than 22 times, virtually half. Standout here is Draisaitl who ranks in the top 5 in 8 of the 9 categories, narrowly missing in regular season assists where he ranked 6th with 71. McDavid is #1 on 5 different lists and #2 on a sixth. Hyman and Bouchard appear 3 separate times, Nugent-Hopkins twice.

I can’t speak for the reader, but this writer can’t look at that output without concluding that 2024 was an extraordinary year in Good Old Ourtown. Even if it did fall a single, agonizing goal short of the ultimate goal.

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