One fact about the Edmonton Oilers that has been true for almost if not all of the Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl era is that they are a top-heavy team. Like most things, when you are too top-heavy, you tend to fall over a lot.
This is an issue that has plagued the Oilers for many years and one that if not deliberately corrected, may continue to be a huge downfall. The Oilers depth scoring needs to be improved and needs to be improved fast.
Compared to many other elite Stanley Cup contenders, the Oilers do not stack up well.
How the Oilers depth stacks up
Using naturalstattrick.com, you can see how a team performs with and without certain players on the ice. Looking at the Oilers with and without McDavid and Draisaitl, it paints a bleak picture.
When McDavid and Draisaitl are on the bench or god forbid, the injured list, the team gets peppered and fails to score consistently. When their two biggest stars are not on the ice the Oilers struggle mightily. I looked at four key performance indicators: Goals for percentage, expected goals for percentage, corsi for percentage, and on-ice shooting percentage.
This gives a good picture of their goal share, their quality chances for, their ability to drive shots and how efficiently they are scoring when McDavid and Draisaitl are gone. I also looked at four other teams; Colorado Avalanche without Nathan MacKinnon and Martin Necas. I looked at the Carolina Hurricanes without Sebastian Aho and Nikolaj Ehlers, and the Vegas Golden Knights without Jack Eichel and Mitch Marner. Also, I looked at the Dallas Stars without Jason Robertson and Wyatt Johnston on the ice.
I looked at each team's top two scoring players to see how each one stacks up.
Compared to other teams, the Oilers stack up like so:
Oilers - 39 GF%, 48.18 xGF%, 47.23 CF%, 6.92 OiSH%
Avalanche - 57.29 GF%, 56.78 xGF%, 56.77 CF%, 8.47 OiSH%
Hurricanes - 53.45 GF%, 55.23 xGF%, 58.4 CF%, 8.99 OiSH%
Golden Knights - 37.82 GF%, 50.7 xGF%, 50.43 CF%, 6.92 OiSH%
Stars - 52.14 GF%, 49.03 xGF%, 46.8 CF%, 10.38 OiSH%
How the Oilers can improve their depth
The Oilers need to continue to add quality pieces to the bottom-half of their roster. Last season, the Oilers did a good job adding Jack Roslovic on a short-term contract that made him a bargain, the team will need to try to recreate that and take more swings to try and get as much value as they can out of their cap dollars.
As well, the team can add young players who are cheap or on entry-level contracts, this is another way to extract surplus value. Players such as Matt Savoie or Isaac Howard will be huge in providing quality depth scoring and both have the potential to be leigitimate top-six scoring forwards for the Oilers.
Bowman will need to gret creative but this is a real issue that they will need to address going forward.
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