Chris Pronger

A little while back, I put together a piece on the Oilers 2005-2006 regular season. Even though they finished 8^th that year, they played some excellent hockey. If not for some weak goaltending during the regular season, they would’ve finished much higher and the playoff run should not have come as a surprise. The LA Kings of 2012 were very similar, in that they barely made the playoffs, but had some excellent underlying numbers. Of course, they went on to win the cup, something the Oilers can only dream about at this point, but I digress.

The Oilers missed the playoffs the season before Pronger arrived, and had been a  bubble team in the years prior. And of course after Pronger left, poof, the team went in the tank and haven’t made the playoffs since. So it’s easy to argue that Pronger was the sole reason why the club had such a fantastic regular season in 2005/2006 and have been miserable since his departure.

But a couple of things get overlooked in this narrative:

1. The team was well built and played some decent hockey before Pronger showed up and,
2. The Oilers have suffered after Pronger’s departure because they refused to replace his minutes with experienced players.

Since possession stats like Corsi and Fenwick are unavailable prior to 2005, I’ve relied solely on the traditional team level stats like shots and special team performance, team points percentages and shot differentials (NHL.com, Hockey Reference, Sporting Charts).

It’s worth re-stating that there’s a good correlation between shot differentials and team success. Of the top 10 teams in terms of shot differentials this season, nine are playoff bound. Of course you do get the odd anomaly, but there’s a good chance of success if your club is getting a good percentage of the shots on goal. Here we can see the Oilers were good at preventing shots on goal, which translated into respectable shot differentials. Since 2006, however, they’ve absolutely bled shots, typically one of the worst in shot differentials, and have become a  regular draft lottery team.

From 2000 to 2006, the Oilers were in a highly competitive division. Even though they missed the playoffs in a few of those years, they were a win or two away from getting in. The average points percentage in the Northwest division was always about 0.550, which no other division could boast. Worth noting that even before Pronger arrived, the team was getting over 56% of the points, which is typically the playoff cutoff.

In terms of the actual roster, the Oilers were doing a very nice job drafting and developing players leading up to 2005/2006. Guys like Shawn Horcoff, Jarret Stoll and Mike Comrie were at centre, while Hemsky and Smyth were producing at an excellent pace. The blue line had experienced players like Jason Smith, Steve Staios, Igor Ulanov and Janne Ninimaa to name a few. Brewer was the only (!) young guy in the mix and did get a lion share of the ice time. But at least he had some veteran experience to support him.

Here’s the Oilers top six defencemen (based on ice time) between 2001 and 2007 (Source: Hockey Abstract):

Strange how the team relied on experienced players leading up to Pronger, but when he left, they decided to hand over the 2^nd and 3^rd most ice time to a couple of young kids. You can be sure that because young Smid was part of the package from Anaheim, management wanted to showcase their prospect to appease fans.

Make no mistake, CFP was an elite player during his time with the Oilers and he had a huge impact on the teams overall success. But you can’t overlook the fact that the Oilers had assembled a pretty decent NHL roster through the draft and trades leading up to his arrival. It was obviously difficult to replace Pronger after he was traded, but the Oilers made little to no effort in assembling a defensive unit and appear to have forgotten how to assemble an NHL roster.

Recommended Links

How to best build a Stanley Cup calibre blueline – Cult of Hockey