The Edmonton Oilers have been stuck for six years, or maybe four. Connor McDavid has been the best hockey player drawing breath since 2017, when he won his first Hart Trophy as the NHL’s MVP. Leon Draisaitl has been everything but his equal since 2019, when he took a leap to being the 100-plus-point scorer he’s stayed since then. Draisaitl won his own MVP in 2020, and the Oilers are now on year three or four of having not just the obvious class of the sport in McDavid, but arguably the second-best forward in the world too. Needless to say, nobody else has two dudes like this at any given time. The last team that did, the Pittsburgh Penguins with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, won three Stanley Cups between 2009 and 2017. The Oilers, some easy logic dictates, should be getting their turn as well.
But since McDavid and Draisaitl arrived, each season, something has gone poorly. In 2018 and ’19, the Oilers’ nonsuperstar players were just bad, and they missed the playoffs. In 2020, they had an excellent team, but the pandemic blew up the season, and they lost in a weird “qualifying round” in a COVID bubble when things resumed. In 2021, they underwent a teamwide meltdown in the first round against the Winnipeg Jets, who swept them. In 2022, they put up a good fight and made the Western Conference Finals, but the Colorado Avalanche team that met them there was maybe the best of the century so far. The Oilers submitted for another sweeping.
This spring may or may not bring the breakthrough, but something is clear now: It’s all right there. The Oilers have had the best tandem in hockey for half a decade, which has been plenty to be in the fight. What they have now, as these playoffs unfold, is a neatly aligned set of stars. As recently as Monday night, they were the betting favorites to win the Stanley Cup. Then they took an embarrassing 5–1 loss in Game 3 against the Vegas Golden Knights, and now the Oilers look in doubt again. For as long as McDavid and Draisaitl have been around, the team has had Cup potential. This moment in 2023 is the first time when they really should, though now they’ll need a comeback from a 2–1 series deficit against Vegas. Everything is still right there for a team that has made business hard on itself.
It would have verged on impossible for the early weeks of the playoffs to go any better for Edmonton. The Western Conference was the more wide-open-looking half of the league, with the Oilers as always right in the mix. The defending-champion Avalanche lost a seven-game first-round series to the post-expansion Seattle Kraken, eliminating one of the two or three teams in the West whose Cup chances were less “ah, sure, it could happen” and more “these guys are a serious threat.” The Golden Knights finished the regular season two points up on Edmonton and have a hell of a competitive team, like always. But Vegas doesn’t have Edmonton’s offensive firepower. Nobody does: The Oilers scored 24 more goals this year than anyone else and their power play scored 32.36 percent of the time, a new NHL record. The Knights are solid all the way around, but they were 14th in scoring. They had a below-median penalty kill.
In a world where everyone’s firing on every cylinder, Edmonton figures out how to win this series. Game 2, a 5–1 win that featured three power-play goals, was what the full Oilers terror machine looks like. And the best goal wasn’t even on the power play, but on the penalty kill, when McDavid did some downright crude things to Vegas defenseman and then toasted poor Laurent Brossoit in the five-hole:
Yet somehow McDavid is not the main guy right now. That’s Draisaitl, who has 13 goals in nine playoff games and might walk to the playoff scoring record. The current standard is 19, held in part by former Oiler and Wayne Gretzky wingman Jari Kurri, and Draisaitl might not even be halfway through the second round yet. If he gets two more rounds, the record will be his. And if he keeps scoring like this, he’ll get two more rounds. McDavid is right when he says Draisaitl “is the best player in the world a lot of nights,” including several recently. McDavid makes a mockery of the rest of the sport by being so much better than everyone else year in and out, but Draisaitl has days, plenty of them, when he’s just as good. The two play together not just on the power play but at even strength, and no amount of stacking lineups against them works.
This team has some inexplicable performances, though. Monday brought one. The McDavid-Draisaitl line, with winger Evander Kane, could not find the net. Kane punched a guy in the face for no discernible reason and took a penalty. When the game was already out of hand, Draisaitl took a couple of angry penalties, one for slashing and one for cross-checking. The defense and goaltending (more on that shortly) broke down, and all of the series’ good vibes (and home-ice edge) shifted back to Vegas.
If the Oilers can figure this out, things elsewhere are breaking in a promising direction. Nothing currently happening in the East is the Oilers’ business, but it does not seem bad for them that the Boston Bruins, the greatest regular-season team to ever skate, have already faceplanted out of the playoffs. It doesn’t seem bad for the Oilers that the Toronto Maple Leafs, Canada’s other great hope to end a Cup drought that could turn 30 this spring, are on death’s door against the Florida Panthers with a 3–0 series deficit. The Panthers could be their own problem, having beaten Boston and about to beat Toronto, but goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky’s reemergence could be fleeting, as most things are with him. Every team left in the field is good, and Edmonton could get a challenge from the rock-solid Carolina Hurricanes or the cartoonishly speedy New Jersey Devils. The teams in the other Western semifinal, the Kraken and Dallas Stars, both have their merits even though I think winning it all is a stretch for either.
The Avalanche, last year’s winners, are gone. The Tampa Bay Lightning, the winners the two years before that, are gone. There’s no looming bully who’d be better than an Oilers team that doesn’t beat itself.
Alas, as we’ve chronicled, during McDavid’s career Edmonton has often been adept at beating itself. Right now the open question is the team’s goaltending. Rookie Stuart Skinner had a tremendous season after unseating starter Jack Campbell during the ride, and the Oilers have a lot of belief in the potential rookie of the year. In a first-round win over the mostly overmatched Los Angeles Kings, Skinner gave up three goals on 11 first-period shots. Coach Jay Woodcroft yanked him, but Skinner was back between the pipes in the next game and resumed his quality play to win the series. But Woodcraft pulled Skinner again after he let in a fourth goal on Monday, and now, who knows? An inarguably bright future doesn’t mean Skinner is the guy the Oilers need right this second, with just two losses separating them from elimination.
The team in front of Skinner is healthy, or as healthy as anyone in this sport at this time of year. All of the Oilers’ defensive pairings have been fine. The forward group has more depth than at any point in the McDavid-Draisaitl era, and the team’s third line of Warren Foegele, Ryan McLeod, and Derek Ryan has been caving in the opposition with puck possession (and produced Edmonton’s only goal on Monday). This year has seen the emergence of a third 100-point star in former No. 1 overall draft pick Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. McDavid and Draisaitl usually score, but when they don’t, there’s more in the cupboard.
None of it promises a damned thing, a lesson the Oilers have learned and relearned as they’ve failed to get over the top with their two megastars. McDavid and Draisaitl are 26 and 27 and should have plenty more bites at the Cup, but this year absolutely represents Edmonton’s best shot yet. Until Monday’s disaster game, everything looked neatly arrayed in front of them. It still is, but now the team’s chances might come down to whether Draisaitl and McDavid can score enough goals—and quickly enough—to make whatever goaltending issues that might arise not matter. If any forward tandem can do it, that’s the one.
