Brightest Timeline, Darkest Timeline: Edmonton Oilers
Last season the Edmonton Oilers were just about as bad as the team with the best player in the world can be. Just about everything that could go wrong did, and more than anything else the club is just looking for better luck this time around.
Lady Luck is notoriously fickle, though, and as is the case for every team, the Oilers could be subjected to either awful or fantastic fortune. Here’s a look at what the former and latter might look like.
Brightest Timeline
Connor McDavid is at an age, 21, where it’s always possible that he finds another gear, and in the best-case scenario he certainly does. McDavid begins to complement his absurd speed and playmaking with more of nose for the net and an eagerness to get to the dirty areas.
The Ty Rattie experiment, which doesn’t invite much rational optimism, pays off enormously as the former nobody becomes a force on the team’s top line. The Ryan Nugent-Hopkins wing conversion also looks good and the McDavid-led unit is the hands-down best in hockey.
Jesse Puljujarvi puts it together and forms a lethal duo with Leon Draisatl on the second line with zombie Milan Lucic picking up some scraps.
The bottom-six, led by a contract-year Tobias Rieder and exciting rookie Kailer Yamamoto, has just enough skill and just enough puck luck not to be a drag.
McDavid finds his stride on the power play, elevating the unit to one of the league’s best alongside Draisaitl and Nugent-Hopkins, and he puts an end to any questions about that being a hole in his game.
On defence, Oscar Klefbom bounces back in a big way and Darnell Nurse proves to be the two-way force that a man with his size and skill is capable of becoming. Evan Bouchard cracks the roster and looks like a top-4 defenceman off the hop.
Cam Talbot shows he’s much more the guy the Oilers saw in 2016-17, but this time he doesn’t need to be quite the same workhorse. Mikko Koskinen looks like an absolute stud from Day 1 and is able to shoulder almost half of the workload.
The Oilers surge to the playoffs, and although they fall to the Sharks in Round 2 there, no one doubts whether they’ve wasted another year of McDavid.
Darkest Timeline
The 2018-19 season proves to be a fascinating case study in how limited one man’s impact can be. McDavid is fantastic, but almost every minute he’s not on the ice is an utter disaster.
Draisaitl looks more and more like a guy who’s best used on McDavid’s wing as opposed to anchoring his own unit. As a result, instead of a top-six and a bottom-six, effectively the Oilers are stuck with a top-three and a bottom-nine.
Among the individual disappointments are Lucic, who goes from semi-functional zombie to full-blown stiff, and Puljujarvi puts on a clinic in on-ice invisibility. Yamamoto just doesn’t look ready and Zack Kassian takes a team-killing number of penalties.
Everything isn’t rosy on the first line either. Rattie plays the Tom Wilson role poorly and looks like the plug he’s always been. Nugent-Hopkins puts up a decent points total, but not one that justifies his absence from his previous all-around centre role.
Klefbom repeats his uninspiring 2017-18. Kris Russell looks totally immobile and Adam Larsson continues to remind Oilers fans how good Taylor Hall is. Nurse is OK, but looks more like a not-a-problem guy than a building block.
Talbot repeats his last season entirely and Koskinen shows us that good numbers in the KHL mean little on this side of the pond.
With mediocre scoring and no goaltending to speak of, the Oilers don’t sniff the playoffs and McDavid’s career looks more and more Sisyphean.
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