Oilers Game 21: Vegas Golden Knights

Well, Connor McDavid seems to be making a comeback. A four-point afternoon on Friday and a five-point night on Sunday enroute to an 8-2 victory over Anaheim. He became the second active player with four assists in back-to-back games along with Nicklas Backstrom in the 2007/2008 season. He’s also now the fourth Oiler after Wayne Gretzky, Jari Kurri, and Paul Coffey to have consecutive four-point games. Whatever was ailing him before appears to’ve been halted or ended. Congrats also to the other Connor for getting his first point as an Oiler at long last. Brown’s signing bonus has been more and more controversial amongst Oilers fans as the season has progressed. I’ve said in past articles that it was only fair to be more patient with him, given the injury he suffered last season. That being said, you can only be patient with any player for so long. It’s nice to finally see his name on a scoresheet. Here’s hoping it’ll boost his confidence. Stuart Skinner looked a bit shaky to start; I think he could’ve stopped the second goal he allowed. But he was pretty solid the rest of the way after that, finishing the night with 21 saves and a .913 SV%.

There’s a Twitter user named JFresh who posts various analytics on hockey players and teams. He posts very interesting stats, and I highly recommend following him if you have a Twitter account. My overall view on analytics is that they’re like swimsuits. They show a lot, but they don’t show everything. They can be a useful tool, but the eye test is still the bigger indicator 90% of the time. However, one stat JFresh posted that really caught my eye was 5v5 Expected Goals Against Per 60. The Oilers are ranked 16th, just in the middle of the pack. You’d think, with how bad October and November have been for Edmonton, that stat should be much worse for them. There’s a difference between being bad and playing bad. That stat shows the Oilers are the latter, but don’t take it as a compliment. They’ve made too many self-inflicting mistakes, and they’ve lacked timely saves from their goalies. If they were to limit those ill-timed errors and start the year with more consistent goaltending, their ranking in that stat would be much higher. So when people claim that the Oilers have one of the worst six-man groups of defense in the league, even the data clearly proves them wrong. They had a really good night on Sunday and rebounded nicely after the Ducks scored their second goal. Their defensemen even got the job done offensively with seven points.

Speaking of defensemen and points, I’ll take a moment here to bring up Mattias Ekholm’s non-goal. To everyone thinking it should’ve counted, there is something called the Parallax View (every Flames fan’s least favourite words). John Shannon had a segment on Sportsnet about this eight years ago. Here is what that view means. On one angle, you can see the puck very blatantly crosses the goal line. But then you see the most important angle, over the net, and the puck is still touching the goal line. Therefore, no goal. It was hard to determine with so much equipment in the way and the ice shedding from Ekholm’s skate when he stopped in front of the net. But I would imagine that the goal didn’t count because of the Parallax View. At least he would score a goal that did count later on, and the team still won by six goals. Let’s see if the Oil can keep it rolling against the defending Stanley Cup champions. The keys to the game are…

Visitors Go Back-To-Back: The Golden Knights have just looked okay after their hot start. They barely have a record over .500 in November and they just played last night on the other side of the province. Play to your strengths and get momentum going early. Make a tired a group work and force them to make mistakes out of fatigue.

Attack The Blue Line: While taking advantage of Vegas’ fatigue, they also have key injuries on defense with Shea Theodore and Alec Martinez out of the lineup. The Oilers need to find openings the same way they did against Anaheim’s defense. It’ll be a tougher task against opponents with a higher pedigree.

Offensive Variety: The powerplay has slowly but surely been coming back to normal. But the Golden Knights have the 6^th best penalty kill in the league. Edmonton have scored eight even-strength goals in their last two games, six of them on Sunday night. The Oilers scored the sixth most even-strength goals last season, a stat commonly overlooked due to their historical PP. If Vegas gives them nothing on the man advantage, they’re going to need to bring the secondary scoring that does show up from time to time.