Oilers fans should keep these 10 numbers in mind as the highly anticipated 2015-16 NHL season approaches.
3,374
As in 3,374 days since the Edmonton Oilers were last in the playoffs. Since owner Daryl Katz took over the team in July 2008, Edmonton has been by far the least successful team in the NHL.
35
That’s the number of points that the Oilers, with 62 points last year, were behind the Calgary Flames — the final Western Conference team to make the playoffs in 2014-15. Edmonton had same crumby total as in 2009-10, the year the team’s most severe drought started.
2
When a generational talent joins an NHL team, it takes on average two years for that team to become a playoff team. But teams with such phenoms, from Howie Morenz in the 1923 to Jonathan Toews in 2007, only make a significant jump in points about one third of the time in the superstar’s rookie season. On average, the point totals of their teams improved just eight per cent that first year. In the second season, though, the teams jumped, on average, another 24 per cent. The Oilers can reasonably be expected to challenge for the 2016-17 playoffs.
3.7
This same group of 15 generational talents (Morenz, Eddie Shore, Maurice Richard, Gordie Howe, Jean Beliveau, Bobby Hull, Stan Mikita, Bobby Orr, Bobby Clarke, Guy Lafleur, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Nicklas Lidstrom, Sidney Crosby and Toews) were in the NHL on average for roughly four (3.7 to be exact) seasons before they won their first Stanley Cup.
-11.4
Don’t expect Connor McDavid to score points anything like Sidney Crosby did in his rookie season in 2005-06. Crosby got 102 points that season, but defensive hockey is back with a vengeance in the NHL. As Cult of Hockey writer Jonathan Willis noted, teams score 11.4 per cent fewer goals per game than they did in Crosby’s rookie campaign.
1.05
That’s the points-per-game total I’m betting Taylor Hall achieves in a major bounce back year for him. In his best two season, 2012-14, Hall average 1.11 and 1.07 points per game, but the NHL keeps tightening up defensively. If Hall can stay healthy, get back to his old level of scoring chance production and have some good puck luck, he has the ability to challenge for the league scoring title.
-2.1
If an NHL team has a hope of winning, it’s got to out-chance the opposition, something the Oilers haven’t come close to doing in recent seasons. Last year, the Oilers averaged 13.4 scoring chances per game for and gave up 15.5 against, for a -2.1 differential.
3
In the late spring Hockey’s Future ranking of top 50 NHL prospects, the Edmonton Oilers placed three candidates in the top 15: Darnell Nurse at sixth overall, Leon Draisaitl, ninth, and Griffin Reinhart, 14th. Of the players in the top 15, the three Oilers were the only position players who weighed more than 200 pounds. So not only is help on the way, that help is plus-sized, just what Edmonton needs.
9,000,000
That’s the amount of dollars that the Oilers have tied up in two veterans, Nikita Nikitin and Teddy Purcell. They are both in the final year of contracts that pay $4.5 million per. Their salaries amount to 13 per cent of the Oilers’ allotted salary cap space this season, and the expiration of these deals will greatly assist Edmonton in having the cap space to keep its young core of stars intact for a while.
865
That’s the career point total of Eric Lindros, a decent number, good for 119th place all-time, but not nearly what was expected. Lindros entered the NHL with all of the fanfare of McDavid, but mainly due to injury, his career burned out too fast and he never won a Stanley Cup. It’s a tough and violent game, and greats like Crosby, Lemieux and Orr have also had their success limited due to injury.
P.S. Welcome to our new format for the Cult of Hockey. Hope you like it. Feedback welcome. We’re still working out a few bugs, but I like this new home for our posts myself.
At the Cult:
Willis: 5 things we learned about Eetu Laurikainen and Oilers at Monday’s prospect’s game
