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 inverno76
Messages: 2496
Registered: September 2005
Location: Prince Albert, Saskatchew...
2 Cups
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Coaching? The players? Tending? Everything?
Zone entries are brutal. They get in, but fail to establish any sustained offence and passes are either ill-timed or the players are out of position. Mostly perimeter shots and even our superstars look disjointed. Skinner has moments, but Pickard has fallen off the map and neither are doing enough. Blue line is a tire fire.
Is it a system change, poor in game coaching, fatigue from two long runs, a personnel problem, or is it between the ears? Here is a little article to consider.
https://corsiknight.substack.com/p/how-nervous-should-the-oi lers-be?utm_campaign=post&triedRedirect=truehttp://
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Twenty-one games into the 2025-26 season, the Edmonton Oilers have won exactly four games in regulation.
That sounds bad, but how bad is it, exactly? For context, no other team in the league has fewer regulation wins, and the other teams Edmonton is tied with (Nashville, Philadelphia, Calgary and San Jose) are a) bad and b) have played fewer games.
Better context comes from the Decade of Darkness.
Four regulation wins through 21 games was the average result back in the three years the Oilers were coached by Dallas Eakins (six and two, respectively) and Ralph Krueger (four). It’s a smaller number than Edmonton managed in its first year after drafting McDavid (five), and significantly worse than any of the Pat Quinn- or Tom Renney-coached teams that really started the rebuild.
It would be a perfect time to panic, except that we’ve seen this before, haven’t we?
Last year, the Oilers won four of their first 21 games in regulation. In 2023-24, they won six. They went to the Stanley Cup Final in both seasons. Is this just another slow start that’s going to turn into a deep playoff run, or is this team fundamentally different? Let’s look under the hood.
We’re looking here at goal difference and expected goal difference at five-on-five.
In 2023-24, Jay Woodcroft got canned for a start where his team dominated expected goal share but struggled to finish and had the worst goaltending in the league. It was always reasonable to expect that the results would improve even if the team didn’t make significant changes.
In 2024-25, Kris Knoblauch’s Oilers weren’t as dominant by the shot metrics but were still a good team. Again, their actual goal share wasn’t a fair reflection of the direction the puck was going.
This year it’s different. Once again, Edmonton is underperforming its expected goal numbers. But this time, the expected goal numbers themselves are bad. Even if the Oilers get league average goaltending and finishing, we’d expect them to lose the five-on-five battle. That makes the slow start this year much scarier than past seasons.
Something else is interesting in these numbers: the problem is entirely on the offensive side of the game. Just look at the expected goal share on the defensive side. In 2023-24, the Oilers surrendered 2.47 expected goals against per hour. This year it’s 2.55 expected goals against per hour. That’s a rounding error. For all the constant handwringing about Edmonton’s defensive play, defensive play isn’t the issue.
The issue is that the Oilers have gone from an offensive juggernaut to a pretty good offensive team to a pretty bad offensive team. They’ve lost almost a full expected goal per hour compared to their start in 2023-24. There are some obvious culprits. They seem like they have a lot less to do with personnel than they do with coaching.
Take the team’s rush game (and a hat tip to Red Eyed Soul on X for starting me down this path). Here’s how many 5v5 rush attempts the team has generated through the first 21 games of the last three seasons:
2023-24: 36
2024-25: 52
2025-26: 9
The Oilers have had some turnover of team personnel, but there’s just no way that this can be attributed to anything but deliberate coaching. Last year Mattias Ekholm alone had nine rush attempts in his first 21 games. This season, that’s the entire team’s output. A team which should arguably be the most dangerous rush team in the entire league now has no offence of the rush at all.
Here’s 5v5 rebound chances created in those same time frames:
2023-24: 116
2024-25: 114
2025-26: 69
As the rush chances have gone away, those critical second opportunities have disappeared as well. Expected goal models love rebounds: typically they come from close to the net and typically the goalie is out of position. Edmonton isn’t generating any of them, and as much as I’d like to blame the forwards for a lack of urgency I can’t help but feel that this is directly connected to the disappearance of a rush attack.
Then there’s this: the percentage of Edmonton’s 5v5 shot attempts taken by forwards vs. defencemen (again, through the first 21 games of the season).
2023-24: 64% forwards / 36% defencemen
2024-25: 60% forwards / 40% defencemen
2025-26: 57% forwards / 43% defencemen
NHL Sid made a nice visual the other day which showed Edmonton had a higher percentage of its 5v5 shots from defencemen than any other team in the league.
The numbers are even worse when we look at the shot attempt data above, which I’d argue is a better measure. Forwards are more likely to shoot from close to the net and get their shots through, which means that looking just at shots understates the opportunity cost of defencemen throwing it on net from the blue line.
It’s also important to note that more shots by defencemen goes hand in hand with fewer rebounds. There’s a hockey trope that playoff goals are scored off greasy point shots that deflect eight times on their way to the net and while there’s some value in point shots the reality is that they create fewer rebounds because they’re a) less likely to get to the net and b) less dangerous when they get there.
We can’t let the personnel entirely off the hook here. Edmonton has a bunch of defencemen with an inflated view of their shooting ability, starting with Darnell Nurse. Over the last three seasons Nurse ranks second among all NHL defencemen in total 5v5 shots, just ahead of Roman Josi and Erik Karlsson. He’s far from the only culprit, but given that three other defencemen on his own team have a) fewer shots and b) more goals in the same span, he’s the one who sticks out like a sore thumb.
Again, though, this goes back to coaching. Where did the rush game go? Why aren’t the Oilers generating second opportunities? Why are the least dangerous players on the ice generating a disproportionate share of Edmonton’s shots?
All of these are questions Kris Knoblauch needs to answer. Perhaps not to the media, maybe not even to upper management, but at the very least for himself. Because if he can’t solve those problems, this team is going nowhere fast. And he just might be.
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