With the Edmonton Oilers having taken the previous nine days off and having played fewer games than any other NHL team, the Oilers will still be sitting at 46 when the action ends on Thursday night. By the end of play on Thursday night, the 32 NHL teams will have played 800 games, an average of exactly 50 games per team. It’s a quiet day in Oil Country as the Oilers “enjoy” an extra rest day between Tuesday night’s hard-fought game in Vegas and Friday’s affair in Anaheim.
Stated otherwise, today marks Day #122 of 192 in the 2023–24 season, or 63.5% of the allocated calendar, for salary cap purposes. At an average of just 2.6 games each week, the Oilers will have played just 56% of their games.
The average NHL team will play 3.2 games a week in the meantime.
Fortunately, the Oilers have been dominant over the last two and a half months, winning 24 games and dropping just four, following a very dreadful first six weeks of the season. From a pitiful thirty-ninth place in the NHL standings on US Thanksgiving, where their.306 points percentage was more than 100 basis points out of 28th and almost 250 out of 16th, they have risen to the top. With a.641 %, they now hold the ninth-place position in the league and are more than 100 basis points ahead of the first team in the West below the playoff cut line.
It is challenging to consider the Oil’s 2023–24 campaign as a cohesive unit due to the stark differences in their performance under the two different coaches. So let’s assess the whole of the negative and the positive in this final moment of clarity before the frenetic finish line. What is the Oilers’ position in relation to the NHL as a whole?
We’ll use NHL.com’s Summary page of team statistics for our purposes today, with a greater emphasis on the league rankings within each area than on the raw data. The page has some repetition, therefore we’ll concentrate on these eight important numbers here: Three of them are offensive, three are defensive, and the first and last are cumulative. In addition, two columns each concentrate on one of the special teams, while the remaining six take results into account in all scenarios.
Lookit, hey! In eight of the eight categories, the Oilers are among the NHL’s top 10. They regularly rank in the top fourth of the league, although they aren’t the best in any one aspect.
Fans of the Oilers have undoubtedly witnessed the most evenly matched team since at least 2016–17, when the team placed seventh in the standings, eighth in goals for, goals against, and shots for, and ninth in shots against. However, that team was worst in the league at the faceoff dot and lacked strength on the penalty kill.
We’ll use NHL.com’s Summary page of team statistics for our purposes today, with a greater emphasis on the league rankings within each area than on the raw data. The page has some repetition, therefore we’ll concentrate on these eight important numbers here: Three of them are offensive, three are defensive, and the first and last are cumulative. In addition, two columns each concentrate on one of the special teams, while the remaining six take results into account in all scenarios.
