Edmonton Oilers offseason outlook Volume #1: Goaltending

I'll start off by saying that I adore Jack Campbell despite not knowing him, and I genuinely feel awful for the guy. Very rarely do I sympathize with professional athletes or celebrities, but certain times a man or a woman will come along with so much charisma and kind heartedness that you can't help it. The list is pretty short for me: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tracy Chapman, and Campbell.

The guy seems like he's the nicest person and was visibly torn apart by his performance, which I will argue in the words ahead is not all his fault, whatsoever. Campbell was thrust into a situation that he had never been in before, for a team that had a rabid fanbase calling for a public execution if their general manager didn't find a solution in net, with only a small list of starting caliber goalies available on the open or trade market.

When the deal for Campbell was announced two summers ago, I had said in another forum that it was not going to age well, although I did not predict it would go as far south as it did. I was raked over the coals online by fans for being negative and toxic, and yet within weeks of the season starting I was his most vehement defender. I don't mean to be too self-congratulatory here either, but bear this in mind.

As I've noted before, the biggest need for this team is now -- and was then -- improving defending, specifically around their net. And while it would be an omission to gloss over Campbell's struggles, I think they were magnified by the lack of structure in front of him, and he and eventually Jay Woodcroft paid the ultimate price.

Don't put it all on Campbell

Now there was plenty of blame to go around. However, one thing that was a consistent thread going through the tape of Campbell's goals against, was opposing players facing no obstruction legal or otherwise when in front of the net. An egregious example I can recall like it was yesterday, was a matinee game against the Dallas Stars, two seasons ago. It was a 6-2 loss on November 5th, 2022.

Campbell's final boxcars were six goals against, 30 saves and an .833 save percentage, which upon a quick glance are obviously not great. But when looking through each goal and what happened on them and in other sequences of the game, it's a miracle they weren't worse. The first goal in particular was a broken breakout by Darnell Nurse and Cody Ceci. Nurse left the zone early and didn't recognize that Joe Pavelski was behind him and in front of Campbell, prophetically anticipating a turnover which ended up in the net.

If you leave a player like Pavelski wide open in front of your own goal, he's going to put the puck in the net regardless of who's in the cage. In the following days to come the conversation was all about Campbell and how poorly he played, which was not honestly assessing what happened in the game at all. And this is a microcosm of his time in Edmonton that appears likely to be coming to an end in July.

The worst part of this job is cutting people down. I hate doing it and I don't mean to come off as mean spirited towards anyone, especially someone like Campbell. But the Oilers can ill afford to carry a $5 million average annual value goaltender who is playing for their AHL affiliate. Not when the stakes are as high as they are and with all the business they need to take care of.

Stuart Skinner is the main man ... for now

Moreover, Stuart Skinner has now shown, with varying results notwithstanding, that he's the guy in Edmonton. At least for now.

At $2.6 million for the next two seasons for a career .909 save percentage netminder, I don't have a strong argument for ditching him as a part of a new plan in this window of contention for the Oilers. Whether this turns out to be a tandem next season and beyond remains up for debate, as he is still young at 25 years of age and has, to be fair, some bad tape on his resume.

The interesting thing about Edmonton's situation heading into next season that is seldom mentioned, is the emergence of Olivier Rodrigue. He had a stellar season in Bakersfield in a split with the aforementioned Campbell, who also saw a resurgence of his own game in the AHL.

Couple this with the fact Calvin Pickard was damn good in his appearances, be it in relief or as a starter. Now, the goalie situation in Edmonton all of a sudden looks like a comparative strength rather than a glaring weakness, as it had been for many years. There are no elite names in this group, but there aren't any awful ones either. Pickard is a pending unrestricted free agent and my sense is he will likely land elsewhere come July 1, but nevertheless Edmonton has options.

Rodrigue and Connor Ungar are both under contract next season, and in Ungars case he belongs to the team a season after that as well. If they re-sign Ryan Fanti, who's a restricted free agent, and buy out Campbell as we all expect, I would wager that next year they begin the season with Rodrigue as Skinner's backup. He has earned a promotion, is on an entry level contract, and the Oilers could desperately use the cap flexibility.

Rodrigue deserves his chance at the NHL level

"Athletic butterfly goalie capable of highlight-reel saves due to his quickness," is what ISS hockey said about Rodrigue in 2017 when he was playing for the Drummondville Voltiguers (which is a hell of a name for a hockey team if I may say so). He's not the biggest guy at 6 foot 1 and 180 pounds, but he's a very good athlete and has quickness to make controlled saves on high danger chances.

Much like Raphael Lavoie -- who I will highlight in the forward group in another installment of this series as someone who I am high on -- Rodrigue has also shown clear and tangible progression in his results. In 2020-21 he split time between the International Central European League and the AHL. In 23 starts in the former he went 10-10, a 3.11 Goals Against Average (GAA), and a .908 save percentage. In the 11 starts that season with Bakersfield, he had boxcars of 2.99 GAA and a .894 save percentage.

There was a slight slip up in Rodrgiue's development at this juncture. He started the following season in the AHL and saw his numbers take a dip, at which point he was assigned to the East Coast League in Wichita, where he again improved to a .907 save percentage. The two years following in Bakersfield where his starts went up to 29 and then 37 games played respectively, his GAA went to 2.77 and then 2.73, while his save percentage improved to .912 and then to .916.

I understand it's a lot of numbers to digest, but that's three consecutive seasons of growth in Rodrigue's stats as well as his workload and therefore sample size increasing. This is a player who at 23-years-old will be, and should be, given an opportunity to be a backup and face NHL competition sparingly in this, the last year of his current deal.

All of this makes the group much less interesting in my view, meaning that I don't see a lot of change on the horizon nor it being necessary. The goaltending situation around the league is shifting to a cheaper and more of a tandem approach. Unless you can say without a doubt you have one of the very few truly elite starters, who are capable of 35 wins and .915 save percentage like clockwork.

I think that the front office will be completely comfortable running this group back and they should be. While unlikely, they can always look to the trade market at the deadline next season, in a 'break glass in case of emergency' situation.

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