How the Edmonton Oilers are Being Affected by Depth Issues

In the NHL, many teams place lots of money on certain players to get the best player in the league but do not equally distribute their money in order to have a team where every line is contributing. For example, the Edmonton Oilers pay players like Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl a lot of money and they contribute a lot, but the rest of the team is filled with mediocre players.

Per CapFriendly, McDavid and Draisaitl take up 25% of the entire team’s cap space. Thinking about game time, Draisaitl and McDavid play on the same line, along with Zach Hyman, meaning they are on the ice at the same time. Draisaitl also averages 22:57 minutes on ice per game and McDavid averages 22:38 minutes on ice per game. This means that for the other 4o minutes of the game, those two are not on the ice. This also means that the players who are on the ice for the entire rest of the game are not good enough to be paid more and are just mediocre players.

Since McDavid and Draisaitl also play on the power play, this means that at the most part, the other players are playing 5-on-5 hockey. The Edmonton Oilers 5-on-5 goals expected goals against is 92.7 while the league average is 89.9 which also shows the decline from when these two player are on the ice vs when they aren’t.

All of these stats and examples show that especially for teams like the Oilers, placing money on players seen as the best in the league might not be the best move if the team in itself cannot hold their own when the two players are not on the ice. Hockey is a team sport and teams will not be successful if each line cannot be productive and the entire team is relying on two players.