The Oilers should have an elite first unit, but they don’t

Having a dominant first line or a stifling top-pairing is a major competitive advantage in the NHL. Possessing both at the same time can mean the difference between fighting for a playoff spot and being a true Stanley Cup contender.

Some of the most dominant teams in league history had an elite five-man unit capable of taking the air out of games for shifts for long stretches.

The late 2000s Detroit Red Wings could get the Pavel Datsyuk line on the ice with the Nicklas Lidstrom pairing, a silly advantage that guaranteed Detroit would own more than 60 per cent of the shots on a nightly basis. The Chicago Blackhawks (Jonathan Toews’ line with the Duncan Keith pairing) and Boston Bruins (Patrice Bergeron’s line with the Zdeno Chara pairing) of the 2010s had similar success and weren’t knocked off their pedestal for many years.

It’s not difficult to see what those elite units look like in 2022. Two of the most prominent examples probably can be found in Colorado and Vegas, where the unifying of players like Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar, or Jack Eichel and Shea Theodore, has meant staggering advantages for their respective teams. They are, simply put, blowing opponents off the ice. The idea here is that the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole, even  when it concerns top-tier players.

That brings me to the Edmonton Oilers and Connor McDavid. McDavid is easily the league’s most dominant player and elevates the play of everyone around him. The Oilers have tried to address the team’s blueline for years with what has been limited success, owing in part to the realities of a hard-cap league where most of the talent skews to the forward position, but also owing in part to misevaluations at the player level.

Darnell Nurse is the one player the Oilers felt confident in to anchor their defensive corps. The Oilers have long figured Nurse could be an impactful defender who is additive to McDavid’s game, unburdening the centre’s defensive responsibilities a touch to let him play the dangerous transition game he’s known for. In theory, it makes a lot of sense.

But the numbers (Nurse has been paired mostly with veteran defender Cody Ceci) continue to disappoint, and I think it’s time the Oilers prioritize this area of the lineup. By way of example, consider the on-ice numbers from just this season for the Colorado and Vegas groupings in relation to that of Edmonton. It’s night and day:

Comparing almost any grouping around the league to the two in Colorado and Vegas might be unfair, but it gives you an idea of what dominance can look like. And though Nurse may not be the same calibre defender as Makar or Theodore, you can flip that argument upside down when it comes to the forwards.

If this were underperformance in one given season, it would be moot – volatility is everywhere in hockey, and on a base of a hundred-plus minutes, you are really into small sample territory. That’s why I find the broader trend concerning. There are no signs the sum is greater than the whole here.

In fact, the data suggests the Nurse pairing is an anchor to the team’s top line:

Elite players have sizable impact on every unit of measure, be it shots, scoring chances, expected goals, or true goal differential.

Prior to this season, McDavid playing with you meant a meteoric rise in offensive production, and a corresponding (albeit much smaller) reduction in defensive performance. After all, part of the McDavid gambit is allowing him to play as aggressive as practically possible – over long periods of time it will drive hugely positive goal differentials, but it can expose a team’s defensive structure in counterattacking situations. And, of course, bottling McDavid and his line in the defensive zone – if you have the horses to do it – remains the best approach to containment.

But what I’m curious about the possibility that Edmonton is containing their own player. Over a five-year horizon, Nurse’s impact to McDavid’s defensive numbers have been negligible at best, and offensively, the Nurse pairing seriously hampers what their top unit can do.

If you go through the video, one of the common themes is this pairing – and Nurse in particular – has real trouble transitioning the puck outside of the defensive zone. That not only means incremental minutes played off the puck, but it also means limited time remaining in a given shift to press the attack.

Nurse is a good and capable defender, and the Oilers will get plenty of use out of him going forward. But if Edmonton does not have a dominant five-man unit, that’s going to limit them against the better teams around the league. We saw that in stretches against Colorado during the postseason last year, and we are seeing it rear its ugly head again in the early stretches of this regular season.

It's something to monitor as Edmonton works through the winter schedule.

Data via Natural Stat Trick, NHL.com, Evolving Hockey, Hockey Reference