The Oilers will have the rights to 3 young high-end Centers by the end of June. They will have the recently turned 22 year old Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, 19 year old Leon Draisaitl, and 18 year old Connor McDavid. This newfound depth at center is fantastic but it’s making a few people get a little wacky.
There are droves of Oiler fans panicking -PANICKING- about ice time.
“How are the Oilers going to play all these Centers?!…
“Who will face the tough opposition?…
“Where are my pants?…
1) I have no knowledge to the whereabouts of your pants.
2) The question of ice time might be a little premature, but it’s still a good question.
Let’s start off by saying it’s way too early in the cycle of this team to be overly worried about ice time for all the great centers they have. Draisaitl has yet to establish himself at the NHL level and McDavid hasn’t even been Drafted yet.
Let’s at least see a few months in a regular season where we can legitimately say “The Oilers really need to get X more ice but who will they take it away from???… Until it’s actually a problem the team can’t otherwise navigate there’s no reason to get antsy.
I’m seeing trade proposals from non-Oiler fans and Oiler fans alike who suddenly feel like there’s such a thing as TOO MUCH depth at the NHL level. Non-Oiler fans I get. Leon Draisaitl is a big center with a wide range of skills who is also the best defensive player on his WHL team. Who wouldn’t want to have this guy (aside from a subsection of Oiler fans who are verifiably insane)?
The reality is that teams have navigated this “Problem… before. In fact, one dealt with that problem all the way to the Stanley Cup.
The Pittsburgh Penguins at the height of their recent success were a club driven by Crosby, Malkin, and Staal down the middle. Crosby struggled with injury trouble for a few years but in 2008-2009 the big three stayed relatively healthy, Malkin won the Scoring title, Crosby finished 3rd, and the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, somehow managing to overcome the great burden of having 3 very good NHL Centermen.
That year the Ice Time for the Penguins trio down the middle looked like this:
PLAYER TOI/G EvTOI/G ShTOI/G PPTOI/G Malkin 22:31 15:53 1:04 5:33 Crosby 21:56 15:36 0:57 5:22 Staal 19:50 13:59 3:31 2:19
So the big three all managed to get in 19+ minutes a night over the course of a full season where the three all played 77 or more games. That’s impressive. Recent trends in ice time for forwards have pushed their minutes down. Only 1 forward in the entire NHL played more than RNH’s 20:38 per game and that was John Tavares at just 2 seconds more.
Thanks to sites like stats.hockeyanalysis.com it’s easy to see who played with whom 5v5 in the Modern Era. It’s with their With or Without You tool that we can see just a little better how the Penguins managed to find so much ice time for Crosby, Malkin, and Staal.
Here are the breakdowns for time spent on the ice with the big three during that 2009-2009 season at Even Strength. I’ve rounded the minutes up and down to the closest minute level and am showing just the top 4 forwards they played with.
Crosby 1108 Minutes: Dupuis 419, Malkin 365, Satan 347, Guerin 156 Malkin 1196 Minutes: Sykora 643, Fedotenko 407, Crosby 365, Cooke 215 Staal 1060 Minutes: Kennedy 476, Cooke 463, Sykora 196, Satan 183
In the case of Crosby, if you’ll recall the Penguins struggled to find him someone to play with until they traded for Chris Kunitz at the deadline. However, one of the means that the Penguins found ice time for their star Centers was to play them together frequently. This past year Crosby played a similar number of minutes and yet only played with Malkin for 70 minutes at Even Strength. Things are certainly different now in Pittsburgh as they only have 2 good Centers, but when they had 3 in their Cup year Crosby spent 33% of his time with Malkin.
When I look at the breakdown of who played with whom on that Penguins team you get the impression that while the “ideal… was to fin Crosby regular wingers. The solution they had to deal with for the majority of the season was pretty ideal in its own right. Two great centermen need ice? Just play one with the other a few shifts a game.
The Oilers of the future are going to have different issues though. They also have the ice times of Hall, Eberle, Pouliot, and Yakupov to worry about. On that Penguins team that was loaded down the middle, the winger with the highest average ice time was Sykora at just 16:17 per game. After him it was Kunitz at 16:16 then Satan at 15:45. The Penguin wingers rode the pine a lot more than current Oiler wingers do.
Hall and Eberle both averaged more than 19 minutes per game. Purcell and Perron had averaged roughly 17 minutes per game. All 4 are higher than the Penguin with the most when Pittsburgh was running so deep down the middle.
Nobody can tell the future when it comes to these kids. Draisaitl might never become the player he is projected to become or he might push RNH to the wing. With a trio of young Centers whose promise and potential is so high we need to be open to the possibility of anything happening.
Will it be a challenge should all these players prove to be healthy dynamic NHL caliber Centermen? Yes. It will. That’s going to be Todd McLellan’s problem to deal with just as it was Pittsburgh’s problem to deal with. It’s an issue teams WANT to have.
Do the Oilers need Defensemen? Yes. More than they need Centers? Nope. RNH is still the only Oiler center I’ve mentioned who is an NHL player as of today. They wouldn’t be trading from a position of strength until it actually becomes a strength in the NHL. The Oilers would be putting the cart in front of the horse if they believed they were a strong team down the middle of the ice just because they had a couple teenage CHL players in the system.
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