Oilhawks
Oden's Ride Over Nordland
- Nov 24, 2011
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I think you are being overly generous with some of these teams. Minnesota for example has a very good defense but a very questionable forward group. Koivu is probably still their top center and he is coming off a significant knee injury at age 36. Parise had a bounce back year last year but he has slowed down a lot and is now 35. Staal is turning 35 as well.Closer to the bottom of the west than to the playoffs IMO. You have St. Louis, Nashville, Winnipeg, Dallas, Minnesota, Colorado, Calgary, San Jose and Vegas who are quite clearly better. Then you have Chicago, Vancouver and Arizona who are probably better. Then there is Anaheim and L.A. who are probably worse. I'd say that Edmonton is in the Chicago, Vancouver and Arizona tier.
On paper, it's a bottom 10 defense, bottom 5 goaltending, one of the worst winger groups in the league.
It's the first season in a long time that I'm not really looking forward to although I'll be invested as always when the regular season gets underway. I'm much more interested in Bakersfield this season.
It's also possible that I'm underestimating this team. Maybe a good system will elicit some real buy in and mask the many deficiencies the team has similar to Trotz with the Islanders last season but the way the roster looks, it's hard to envision a highly competitive team this season. The future looks a lot better if the prospects are groomed properly and some cap flexibility is created but the short term should be painful.
83.3 points is Dom L’s prediction. He has been deadly accurate the past 2 seasons with his methodology.
It’s an Athletic article so it’s paywall.
Lol, no Dom isn't deadly accurate.
In the 2016-17 season he predicted something similar, was completely wrong. Instead of owning up to it being a miss on his model, he declared it was a wash.
Calling the Oilers a team with three third pairs is par the course for Dom.
Because the West was a dumpster fire. They still had like 5 teams to jump over.Weren’t they mathematically in it til mid March last year?
it will all depend on whether or not we get any production out of the AHL guys up front like Benson, Marody and Gambardella, or our 2 free agents Nygard and/or Haas, as well as whether or not Bear/Jones or both can make the team and play solid D and score points. if not, then likely out by February?
If everyone on the team plays on average... at their average level... the team at it stands now is a ~96 point team with about a 75% chance of making the playoffs.
If they collectively perform above average... the team is a 98+ point team with a 100% chance at the playoffs.
If they are hit with a tougher stretch of injuries than average (this IS the Oilers so this is very possible) and/or they regress as a team like they did last year... they obviously will not sniff a playoff spot yet again.
Remains to be seen which scenario plays out but for now I'm going with the average scenario... 96 point team with ~75% chance at playoffs.
If we see performances above expectations from 1 or more players like Nygard/Persson/Benson etc... the chances of playoffs very quickly could rise to that 100% likelihood.
Based on what?
Sean Tierney from Charting Hockey and his contribution of WAR charts has us at a 74 point team, tied with Detroit for 29th and Dom Luszczyszyn who's arguably among the best analytics writers has us ranked 27th with 83.3 points and a 20% chance at the playoffs.
Based on what?
Sean Tierney from Charting Hockey and his contribution of WAR charts has us at a 74 point team
Based on what?
Sean Tierney from Charting Hockey and his contribution of WAR charts has us at a 74 point team, tied with Detroit for 29th and Dom Luszczyszyn who's arguably among the best analytics writers has us ranked 27th with 83.3 points and a 20% chance at the playoffs.
Honestly I think forecasting this team to be a 74 pt team is a bit nutty.... the bottom 6 was horrendously bad last year and they had **** backup goaltending from Talbot and the team STILL had almost 80 pts... so to forecast that they'll be 5 pts less this season than last year is just being pessimistic for the sake of being pessimistic.
It's possible some of the predictions and projections are taking into account that McDavid will miss quite a bit of hockey this year which may skew the projections to the downside but that's making assumptions that I don't think you can really count on... ANY player can get hurt and miss games and we can't realistically know in advance if the Oilers will have a higher amount of critical man games missed due to injury this year or not... so I'm not factoring that into the projections.
Out of it by early March.
Too late to be sellers, but not in a state to be buyers either.
It's not predicting McDavid missing any time. It does take into account things like McDavid and Draisaitl regressing back to their average career shooting percentages for instance, which is a 25 goal decline from last year. Jonathon Willis also wrote a piece for the Athletic taking our goaltenders predicted 5-on-5 SV% based on age regression which predicts 20-25 goals more against than last year's total.
Dom uses a pretty interesting formula that gives each individual player a value that contributes to total wins for a team and got pretty good results with it last season. He explains in his Oilers preview that after the top-3 forwards, the rest of the group would have ranked 31st in the league in this category.