Are the Oilers (already) better than last season?
Like every team, the Oilers wasn’t perfect in the 2021-22 season. But even with the fragilities on the defense and in goaltending, the team played hockey until June and was just stopped by the Stanley Cup Champions Colorado Avalanche, in a series that the sweep doesn’t tell the full history.
But anyway, the past is the past and the organization has to use it to get even better, and that seems to be what they are doing. We are going to analyze every main position of the team, the goalies, defensemen and forwards.
In this first article, we will begin with the goalie position of the Edmonton Oilers
Between the pipes we already have an (almost) full change, with Mikko Koskinen going to play on the HC Lugano on the Swiss League and Mike Smith probably spending the last year of his contract on the LTIR. With that in mind, the Oilers needed to find completely new players for the position.
And they found it on Jack Campbell. The 30-years-old goalie received a 5 years contract (5M AAV) and promises to bring the stability on the goal the team has been searching for some years. Of course, he isn’t a Vezina candidate, but his career stats of 2.53 GAA and sv% of .916 is already an upgrade from the unpredictability the team faced in the last year(s). In the 2021-22 season, he got 31 wins in 49 games played with the Toronto Maple Leafs. It will be good to finally expect to see someone being undoubtedly the first-choice goalkeeper on the team since Cam Talbot was an Oiler.
And the team already showed some support to Campbell, letting him know he will have a good environment both at the locker room and with the city and fans. The 4-time Art Ross Trophy winner and 2-time Hart Memorial winner Connor McDavid said the following:
(…) “if you can find success as a goalie in the pressure cooker that is Toronto, you can find it anywhere.” “If he can be a starter for Leafs, he can be a starting goalie anywhere” “Obviously this is the hockey hotbed and there’s a tremendous amount of pressure on whoever fills that net.”
And he wasn’t the only Oiler to talk about the new goalie. Zach Hyman, his former teammate in Toronto, spoke to him before he made the decision about coming to Edmonton:
“It’s tough. I went through the same sort of decision the year before and everybody thinks it’s so exciting and amazing,” said Hyman. “And it is, but there’s also the element of uncertainty and to going to a new environment, so I just tried to convey my experience as best as possible.”
But he wasn’t the only new goalie in town. The Oilers also brought Calvin Pickard. This other 30-years-old goalie is supposed to alternate between the AHL and the backup goalie position. Pickard only played 3 NHL games last season, and his last NHL game was on March 27th, when he played only 22 minutes before allowing 4 goals and being replaced.
And Pickard is expected to alternate between NHL and AHL because the one goalie that can have an excellent season as a backup is Stuart Skinner. The hometown boy will be 24 years old in the 2022-23 season, and even with only 14 career games in the NHL, he already proved that can be worth to take him from the Bakersfield Condors and receive the responsibility of being always ready to replace Campbell anytime the team needs, in the full season. As written by Rob Couch from The Hockey Writers:
Since Skinner is graduating to the NHL and Ilya Konovalov returned to the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) after his time in North America didn’t go as planned, the Oilers were left with just Oliver Rodrigue, a former second-round pick. That was until the team signed Calvin Pickard as the third goalie in the system who can jump between the AHL and NHL if needed and top college free agent Ryan Fanti.
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In the AHL with the Condors, he had an excellent .914 sv% in 2020-21 and ever a better .920 sv% in 2021-22. Going to his “big league” numbers, Skinner has 2.80 GAA and .909 sv% on his 14 games in the NHL, and his last NHL game was a Shoot-Out (Feb. 14 @SJS. 20 SA) We just expect him to fulfill the expectation, that he can show his talent, evolve even more and be trustworthy for the coach Jay Woodcroft. As every second spent on the main team will for sure bring positive results for Skinner, and he is fully aware of this opportunity.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, it takes a lot of time,” Skinner said. “When I was 18 and I got drafted, I was on top of the world. Then it kind of hits you that the real work begins.”
In the same opportunity, Skinner kept saying the advantages of being granted this opportunity and how he looks to evolve more each day:
“Just growing and going through everything you go through in order to get to the NHL, you’re so grateful. You’re a little bit like a kid again,” Skinner said about playing for the team he grew up cheering for. “It’s like ‘wow this is actually happening’. It’s so cool and just being able to be on the Oilers, wearing that logo, being around the players in that locker room is incredible.”
But if Campbell numbers bring stability, we can’t say the same about injuries’ reliability. Since January 2021, Campbell suffered three different injuries and was on the Covid list for 10 days. That would have to put these backup goalies onto the main role of the team, and as injuries are unpredictable, it might happen on a regular season game, a pivotal playoff one or, if everything goes all right, they simply don’t happen at all. Apart from that, for an athlete to return on the same or higher level he was before the injury isn’t an easy thing. Here we have a comparison of Campbell’s numbers before and after his injuries made by Allan Mitchell on The Athletic.
On January 26, 2021, he suffered a leg injury and missed 14 games. Campbell played in just two games before the injury, with a .923 save percentage and a goals-against average of just over 2.00. He won both games. Upon his return, Campbell shut out the Oilers in Edmonton, stopping 30 shots on February 27. On March 1, it was reported he had a lower-body injury and missed eight games. He returned on March 20, and went 5-0-0 with a .950 save percentage.
In last season, he had to deal with another injury and he also was placed on the Covid list for 10 days. His numbers after these intervals recovering are listed next, taken from the same source already credited:
On December 18, he was placed on the Covid list for 10 days. In the five games before he was placed on the ineligible list, he posted a .909 save percentage (going 3-1-1). In the five games after his return, Campbell’s save percentage was .907 (4-0-1 record). Campbell’s performance was within the range of expectations upon his return. Beginning March 10, 2022, he missed 10 games with a rib injury. In the five games before the injury, his save percentage was .842 (1-2-1) and he was in and out of the lineup (missed five games during the leadup to his trip to the injured list). Upon return, in the first five games, Campbell posted an .889 save percentage but delivered a 4-0-1 record. It’s possible Campbell’s rib injury both impacted his performance before he was placed on IR and then lingered after his return. Excluding the five games before the March 10 IR trip, and the first five games after his return, Campbell’s save percentage in 2021-22 was .926. That would have landed Campbell No. 2 among NHL goaltenders with 30 or more games one year ago. His final total, .914, was good enough for No. 14 across the league among qualifying goaltenders.
As we could see, Campbell is more than capable of returning playing great after an injury. And if we start to compare on what the Oilers had last season, that is not a concern for a team used to have the 40-year-old Mike Smith on goal.
There is this old saying: “Every great team starts with a great goalie”. We all know Campbell will hardly be a Vezina candidate, and Skinner still has a lot of time to improve. But the Oilers doesn’t need a Vezina winner (right, Calgary Flames?), they just need someone more reliable than the ones we saw in the last years between the pipes. And with the best team of the decade, Jack Campbell and Stuart Skinner (and even Pickard if necessary) brings, in theory, a security the Oilers doesn’t see in a really long time.
Next. Top 3 Fantasy Breakout Players On The Edmonton Oilers for 2022. dark