Nugent-Hopkins faces an identity crisis

Can you play centre if you can’t win a faceoff ?

Probably not, unless you’re Evgeni Malkin and you’re leading the playoff scoring, have a Hart trophy and 832 career points over 11 seasons. Add on two Stanley Cup rings and nobody bats an eye at your 43.5 per cent career average on the dot.

Andrew Cogliano couldn’t do it here, moving to wing, where he became one of the best shutdown forwards in the NHL. And after some six years, teams decided Sam Gagner was better on the wing than at centre and in a specialty role as a power-play guy.

Which brings us to Ryan NugentHopkins.

If the Edmonton Oilers want to play Leon Draisaitl in the No. 2 centre hole, then the previous resident has to be a Mike Fisher type of third-line, shutdown guy. Nugent-Hopkins’ $6-million salary screams no to that idea. In a salary cap world, it’s not a good contract with his 77 points in 137 games over the last two seasons and four years left on his deal.

But if he won at least half of his draws, that would be just fine.

Unfortunately, Nugent-Hopkins won just 43.8 per cent of his 1,268 faceoffs. Nugent-Hopkins is one of the Oilers’ top four penalty killers and dogged as a checker. But shorthanded, he won 33 per cent of his faceoffs, which means the opposing team had the puck the other two-thirds of the time.

He’s a solid NHL player for sure, but at what point does he follow

someone like Cogliano out to the wing?

Already six years into his NHL career, he’s 43.2 per cent over 5,883 faceoffs, going from 45.7 per cent to 44.8 to 43.8 over the last three seasons. Can’t he be a top-six winger instead off of his skill set? Perhaps, but he shoots left, so he’d be best served on left wing, where the Oilers already have Patrick Maroon and Milan Lucic at No. 1 and No. 1a. Maybe the Oilers could look at him on the right side with Draisaitl and Lucic, but that would be his off-wing.

Actually, that is where the rightshot Jordan Eberle, who still had 51 points on what can only be considered an off-year for him, should play if he doesn’t get traded.

So what does Todd McLellan see for next year? What do they need?

“We need compression time so we can look at our group as to our strengths and weaknesses,” the coach said. “We have a general idea. There’s a number of factors that come into it, though.”

So what does he see in NugentHopkins, who twice had 56-point seasons, but ended up with 43 this year, along with four points and no goals in the playoffs?

“Nuge is a tremendous player, a detail player. There’s more offence to him and that’ll be the message we deliver to him,” said McLellan.