The Oilers have run into the problem they were most vulnerable to all year: A lack of secondary scoring. When the Oilers balanced their lineup in the summer to add more stable defending, they did it at the expense of a player who could drive offense from the 2nd line. They hoped some other additions would mitigate the loss, and for most of the year they have. Now everybody not playing with McDavid has gone dry.

It’s the scenario everybody knew could come to be, but we were all hopeful it wouldn’t. Unfortunately, Milan Lucic has been a disaster scoring 5v5 this year. He has produced offense at the same rate as Benoit Pouliot (0.99 points per 60 vs Pouliot’s 0.98 points per 60). That’s despite the fact that Lucic has played 423 minutes with Connor McDavid 5v5 and Pouliot has only played 35 minutes. If we break Lucic’s offensive production into With McDavid and Without McDavid we get more alarming results.

Lucic With McDavid: 1.27 Points/60, 423.6 mins
Lucic Without McDavid: 0.66 Points/60, 361.3 mins

Even when he’s with McDavid, Lucic is failing to contribute at an appropriate level. Without McDavid and he’s basically Alexander Burmistrov or a 90 year old Jarome Iginla. It isn’t at all what the Oilers thought they had committed a hojillion dollars and 7 years to, that’s for sure. When neither player is with McDavid, Benoit Pouliot is the more productive winger, and Pouliot has just 10 points and hasn’t scored a goal since December 8th (26 games). Think about that.

But it’s not just that Pouliot and Lucic are experiencing career low seasons of productivity. It's that Nugent-Hopkins and Eberle are struggling too. Draisaitl was doing pretty well away from McDavid’s line, but once he was coupled with the Wunderkind he started to produce even more. The net result of all these things was that only Maroon, McDavid, and Draisaitl have been going offensively. The 2nd and 3rd lines have been sputtering along trying to drag Lucic and Pouliot along. With Draisaitl on top line duty, Caggiula has had to play center and I’m not convinced he’s right for that job at all.

The three most critical players to turn around are going to be RNH, Eberle, and Lucic. I think that goes without saying. That’s 18 million dollars on the cap and they are all three sitting at 11 goals this year. All three are on pace for 16 goals. Lucic hasn’t scored that few in a full season since he was a rookie. Nugent-Hopkins is not only on pace to score his fewest number of goals in a full season, but he’s well behind the offensive pace he was on from a year ago when he only played 55 games. Jordan Eberle finished with 16 goals once in his career…there were only 48 games that season.

This is the total breakdown of secondary scoring that Oiler fans feared was possible. McLellan has split his centres up and re-united Lucic and Draisaitl. It cant just be McDavid out there.

LINEUP

Maroon McDavdi Eberle
Lucic Draisaitl Slepyshev
Caggiula RNH Kassian
Hendricks Letestu Pakarinen

Klefbom Larsson
Sekera Benning
Davidson Gryba

Talbot
Brossoit

OILERS KEYS TO THE GAME

1) Paging Lines Two, Three, and Four. Yeah, we’ll harp on it one more time. The Oilers need someone from the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th lines to create offense. The Edmonton Oilers have scored 1 or fewer goals in four straight games. That isn’t anywhere close to good enough for this team. While Talbot didn’t give them much of a chance on Saturday, this group isn’t giving Talbot much help either. Nuge should be better. Lucic should be better. Eberle should be better. Right now, the hope is Draisaitl will give that 2nd line a boost. It needs more than a boost though. It needs resuscitation.

2) PK Blues. The Oilers carried a lot of the play against the Hawks 5v5 but some poor goaltending and critical errors undid a lot of that. It resulted in some pundits saying the team was “vastly outplayed” but that wasn’t really the case. They were guilty of some boneheaded errors, but they weren’t vastly outplayed, except on Special Teams. The Oilers dropped the ball in a big way on special team. They were 0/2 on the Power Play and allowed the Hawks to go 2/2 on their man-advantages. Edmonton mustered just 2 shots on their 2 Power Plays while the Hawks put 6 on Talbot in their 2 tries. Not good enough. Not good enough from everybody involved.

3) So Hot Right Now. Martin Hanzal (along with Brian Boyle), remains a trade deadline target for the Edmonton Oilers as a 3rd line center. He, along with the rest of his club, played last night against the Flames and he picked up a goal along the way. In fact, he has 3 goals in his last 2 games, so if the Oil have been watching, he’s been heating up at exactly the right time. He only played 14:30 last night, so while he’s on the 2nd half of a back-to-back, he shouldn’t be overly worn down. The Flames didn’t give the Yotes much of a battle. Thanks for nothing, Calgary.

Puck drops tonight at 7PM Mountain Time on Sportsnet West. Game On!

Follow me on Twitter @Archaeologuy

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