A post season update to see how well the consensus did here on the HFOil boards in predicting how many points each Oiler would get in the 17/18 season:
McDavid Consensus 108 Actual 108 Differential EXACT ... Nice going everyone, Big Red Star for getting this one exactly right.
Draisaitl Consensus 75 Actual 70 Differential -5 ... Safe to say he would have been very close to 75 if he wouldn't have missed 4 games.
Lucic Consensus 53 Actual 34 Differential -19 ... easily one of the more disappointing Oilers and expectations obviously didn't live up to reality.
RNH Consensus 51 Actual 48 Differential -3 ... obviously missing 20 games hurt his point totals and if he would have played even a handful more games he'd have reached his consensus predicted level. One of the few positive surprises on the team last season.
Strome Consensus 49 Actual 34 Differential -15 ... didn't have the offensive results that many were looking/hoping for but I think the majority were at least accepting of his role as a decent 3rd line C by the end of the season. I still expect him to do better offensively going forward.
Klefbom Consensus 44 Actual 21 Differential -23 ... another big disappointment offensively and I'm sure we are all hoping most of that decline can be attributed to the injury issues he had and not just an overall regression in his play.
Maroon Consensus 44 Actual 43 Differential -1 ... The consensus got it almost exactly right even though only 30 of his 43 pts were made while he was with the Oilers. Somewhat odd that one of the few players that essentially lived up exactly to expectations gets traded away.
Puljujarvi Consensus 36 Actual 20 Differential -16 ... Didn't have that "next step forward" type of offensive season that most thought he might take and a lesson in tempering expectations of teenagers adapting to the North American game and environment.
Caggiula Consensus 35 Actual 20 Differential -15 ... Another young sophomore player who basically stagnated offensively and didn't take that next step up.
Jokinen Consensus 35 Actual 17 Differential -18 ... Only 1 point in his 14 games with the Oilers saw him quickly exit the org... and he managed only 16 more points on his journey through 3 other teams after leaving the Oilers. Has any other player played less than 20 games each with 4 different teams in 1 NHL season? Seems to have done ok in his 4th stop in Vancouver but was certainly underwhelming offensively for most of the year.
Letestu Consensus 30 Actual 23 Differential -7 ... came up 7 shy of expectations on the year but only had 19 in 60 games with the Oilers before being traded away. Rather than being a massive disappointment though, I think we just saw a more typical Letestu rather than the career year type of Letestu we saw the year before. Interesting that the consensus picked him to score 5 fewer pts than he did in 16/17 so the general feeling was that he would likely take a step back offensively... which is exactly what he did.
Kassian Consensus 29 Actual 19 Differential -10 ... A disappointing year where I think a lot of people thought he might take that step up offensively after seeing him perform fairly well in the playoffs (although he only had 3 goals in 13 playoff games... but every goal seemed huge). I thought he'd take that step up as well. He obviously has a reputation for being inconsistent over the course of his career but I think if he's hungry enough he could approach the 30 pt mark again... last year he didn't seem to have that hunger level often enough.
Larsson Consensus 26 Actual 13 Differential -13 ... Injuries, tragedy and sinking along with the team wide regression was the story for Larsson's offensive decline. I think this is one player that can absolutely rebound towards the mid-20's in pts even though he's only cracked the 20 point mark once in his career.
Slepyshev Consensus 25 Actual 12 Differential -13 ... Early season injuries started him off on a poor offensive track and he never really regained from there as he sank along with the rest of the team in the limited minutes and games he did receive. In fairness, many felt he wasn't given the opportunities by the coaches to see if he could contribute more and missing 30 games and only seeing under 12 minutes per game pretty much guaranteed there was no way he could achieve the consensus expectations.
Benning Consensus 23 Actual 21 Differential -2 ... Missed the consensus by 2 pts and all in all not a bad showing offensively considering he missed 9 games. He likely could have reached that 23 point mark with a full season of games.
Nurse Consensus 20 Actual 26 Differential +6 .... Wow!! FINALLY a player that beat their consensus number. Taking a big step forward offensively and defensively, Nurse was easily one of the most improved players and pleasant surprises on the team. On a team with so many regressions and disappointments, Nurse's growth into a budding top dman was one of the few signs of optimism many could take from a very pessimistic season.
Sekera Consensus 20 Actual 8 Differential -12 ... Well this was a tough one to forecast because before the season started we knew Sekera would be out until ~ late November and that eventually stretched to late December and of course it was also a question of how he would respond after his injury and how soon he would be back to "normal" again. The answer obviously was that it would not be anything close to an instant bounce-back and we're all obviously hoping this summer has helped him get back closer to 100% again.
Russell Consensus 19 Actual 21 Differential +2 ... Beats consensus by 2 pts which is a reasonable result on a team with so many missing the consensus. I thought he started very well offensively and was doing his best to fill the obvious offensive void from the Oilers D early in the season but his offense gradually faded away later in the season and overall his season was average at best... good start... poor finish, but again one of the very few players that essentially met the consensus offensive expectations.
Auvitu Consensus 14 Actual 9 Differential -5 ... I was critical of the Oilers usage of Auvitu last season and I'll do so here again. Tallying 9 pts in just 33 games (and playing just 13.5 minutes in those 33 games as well) to me was a sign that you would want to try and use him in a few more games (and a few more minutes per game) to see if that offense could actually help out the club. Obviously the coaches felt otherwise and he came up short of the consensus expectations but I would certainly have an asterisk besides this one as surely he would have added more than an extra 5 pts if he would have been utilized better by the coaching staff.
Khaira Consensus 14 Actual 21 Differential +7... Expectations weren't huge for Khaira but he beat them nicely coming up with 50% more pts than the consensus expected he'd produce. He took a solid step forward and actually was tied for 5th on the team in ES+SH goals. Some might say he got a bit lucky as he shot 15.1% but he may just have a bit of a sneaky sniper shot when he gets it off. Now he just needs to boost his shot totals as he only gets about 1 shot per game in his career so far. Definitely a nice surprise to the upside and one of the very few bright spots among the forwards... especially among the bottom 6.
Pakarinen Consensus 12 Actual 3 Differential -9 ... Playing 40 games at 10 minutes a game makes it fairly hard to exceed expectations and he fell well short. Didn't help that he only shot 4% as well. One more player among many that had disappointing years and one of several who won't be back because of not being able to shine on a dull team last season.
Gryba Consensus 9 Actual 2 Differential -7 ... He was sent down after playing just 21 games so he never had a shot at hitting his consensus total. In theory, playing 82 games he likely would have come close but he likely never would have played more than 40-50 games even if he had stayed up with the big club. A victim of the team having a poor start and being slow, he was a natural to be expelled... even though I really don't think his overall play was terrible, offensively he obviously didn't add much to the team.
Stanton Consensus 5 Actual Nil Differential -5 ... Only 1 prognosticator chose Stanton to produce any points at all last season with the Oilers and he ended up playing 0 games with the Oilers. Wasn't a bad bet though because he has looked decent in the past in stints with Vancouver... producing over 10 pts in back to back seasons in 13/14 and 14/15.
Jones Consensus 3 Actual Nil Differential -3 ... Only 1 participant thought that Jones might get enough of a cup of coffee with the Oilers to produce ~3 pts. Jones ended up having a fairly pedestrian season with Bakersfield and his cup of coffee actually went to Bear instead who produced 4 points in 18 games.
So overall here's the only players that actually BEAT the HFOil consensus offensive expectations:
Khaira +7
Nurse +6
Russell +2
McDavid (Even) In a down year across pretty much the entire team, meeting expectations is definitely as good as beating them.
Pretty short list.
Interestingly... if all those Oilers players were to have met their consensus expectations, the team would have had 779 pts among the dmen and forwards.
The average pts/goal last season in the NHL was 2.6935 so that means the consensus here was projecting the Oilers to score ~289 goals in 2017/18.
Obviously that was pretty optimistic seeing as only one team (Tampa Bay) scored that many goals last season and the Oilers managed only 229 actual goals (5 more shootout goals increased their official total to 234).
Lesson learned is that we are an optimistic group here in general but that's to be somewhat expected when the Oilers were coming off their 1st playoff berth in over a decade.
Next season hopefully this team can come much closer to meeting expectations although I also expect those consensus numbers may be somewhat more reduced for some players compared to what people here were projecting last summer.
I'll probably run another thread asking for input on pts expectations again in mid-September just like I did last season once camp opens and we have a decent idea what the final makeup of the team should be going into this season.
