This season’s edition of the Edmonton Oilers is the best and deepest one we’ve seen in quite some time.
The depth on this team is so astounding that Ryan Nugent-Hopkins regularly plays on the third line. He’d be a first line center on most other teams, maybe a second line center at worst.
They had a rough patch earlier in the season, but that is largely cleared up now.
One player who has really broken out this season has been Kailer Yamamoto. He’s been a staple in the top six, usually playing RW on Leon Draisaitl’s line.
Against San Jose last night he recently passed a great milestone – he cracked the 20 goal mark for the first time in his career, and becoming the fifth Oiler to hit that mark. The others are Connor Mcdavid (44), Leon Draisaitl (55), Zack Hyman (27) and Evander Kane (22).
No one else will clinch that mark tonight in the final regular season game against Vancouver – unless you think Jesse Puljujarvi is going to light up the Canucks for six goals tonight. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
Notwithstanding whatever Yamamoto gets against the Canucks tonight, his 20-20-40 in 80 games at the time of this writing will stand as a career best for him in goals and points. It will almost double his previous career best in goals which was 11 and best his career points by almost 50% which was 26.
The only damper on his season will be that his +/- went down from +9 last year to -1 this year. Hopefully we can chalk that up to facing tougher competition and he’ll improve on it next year. He’s still only 23, after all, so he’s two seasons away from his prime producing years. He also spends time on both special teams, on the second unit PP and the first unit PK. He’s 10th on the team in PP ice time with 0:49, and 1:10 ice time per game on the PK. That last mark is only 14th on the team.
He’s also an RFA after the season is up. Let’s look closer at what we should do going forward with the player on a new contract.