THE SUM OF THEIR PARTS?
Oilers just don’t add up
A little help? Connor McDavid could use some.
The Edmonton Oilers captain might be the best hockey player in the world, but a quick look at the bottom of the NHL standings tells you he can’t do it alone.
McDavid is doing everything but putting the team on his back and carrying it. He has 17 points in the last 11 games and might win the Art Ross Trophy on a non-playoff team, which would be an embarrassing indictment of the Oilers organization.
You have a generational talent producing at the top of his game three years after your team won four draft lotteries in six years and the team ranks 27th overall? To say the Oilers are wasting his talent is a strong way to put it, but that’s kind of what’s happening.
“He’s trying to impose his will on the opposition and on our team, trying to get guys to follow him. That’s what good leaders do,” said head coach Todd McLellan, who has also got 15 points out of Leon Draisaitl over the last 11 games.
“The upper echelon in the lineup is producing. It’s that mid-range that’s missing right now and you can’t win games without it.”
When a team’s high-end skill is firing on all cylinders, all it needs is for everyone else to just be average and it will win more than it loses. But even though Edmonton’s two lead dogs have combined for 32 points in the last 11 games, they ’ve lost six of them.
“You need secondary scoring,” McLellan said. “You can’t count on Connor every night and you can’t count on Leon every night. There has to be a second level of production, an ability to take the pressure off those two and get the opposition thinking about some other players.”
You can’t count on Connor every night and you can’t count on Leon every night. There has to be a second level of production ...
That’s because it’s pretty easy to shut down a two-man team.
“It won’t be long before the other two dry up because the focus is just going to go solely on them,” McLellan said. “We’re striving and pushing to get some other guys involved on the scoresheet.”
The ugliest, and least surprising, stat of the Oilers season is this: There have been 16 games in which McDavid hasn’t registered a point this year. Edmonton won two of them. Six were shutout losses. In five others, the Oilers scored one goal.
Edmonton’s only win in the last five games came on a night when McDavid had four goals and an assist in a 6-2 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning.
“He’s kind of taken the bull by the horns and trying to take things in the right direction,” Oilers winger Milan Lucic said. “And it’s up to us to follow his lead.”
Any time now would be good. The key droughts are glaring. Lucic and Ryan Strome haven’t scored in 18 games. Mike Cammalleri is 16 and counting. Patrick Maroon is at seven. Drake Caggiula has three in 27. Mark Letestu hasn’t scored in 19.
“It takes a whole team to get the job done,” McLellan said. “You never like to single out individuals but when some of those key players have gone (dry) that long, and they’re not delinquent with their intentions, it’s just not going for them and they need to do some things better.
“But the teams that are winning and having constant success are getting a lot more out of those players on a consistent basis. When it does go for people like Strome and Lucic and some of the others, maybe they’ll get on a roll.”
Saturday’s 6-4 loss to the Sharks in San Jose is one of the rare times when McDavid didn’t pick up a point but the rest of the cast provided solid run support. Even then it was two goals from Zack Kassian, one from Brandon Davidson and a two-point night from Draisaitl.
“We’ve been able to get some goals from players we maybe don’t count on as much,” McLellan said. “If we can keep that up, get our D involved in some of the offence — which is a little bit disappointing right now as well — and get some key players up front (producing), we’ll see what happens.”