Edmonton Oilers could be on their way to best regular season since 1980s
The Edmonton Oilers could very well be on their way to having the best season in franchise history since the 1980s.
At the moment, the team currently sits in a tie for sixth place in the NHL with a 24-12-3 record and 51 points. It’s a great place for the Oilers to be at as they are only six points back of the first-place Vegas Golden Knights and is seven points up on the Vancouver Canucks, who occupy the last playoff spot in the Western Conference.
It’s also better than where the Oilers found themselves at this point last season, where they played to a 23-15-1 record and had 47 points through the first 39 games of the season. Edmonton finished last season with a total of 104 points and if they can keep up their current pace, they may wind up having their best season since the Wayne Gretzky-led teams of the 1980s.
The mark that they will need to break to hit that milestone is the 109-point plateau, which they last hit during the 2022-23 season. That was the fourth-best regular season result in Oilers franchise history and only fell behind a pair of 119-point campaigns accomplished in both the 1983-84 and 1985-86 seasons as well as a 111-point result in the 1982-83 season.
As it currently stands, this year’s Oilers squad has a .654 points percentage (P%) throughout the first three months of the season, which would put them on pace to hit about 107 points throughout an 82-game season. That would land them just short of those results from the 1980s, but there is reason to believe that they could wind up overperforming that pace.
The first is that the team is playing much better after a rocky start to the season saw them get off to a mediocre 7-7-1 record through the first 15 games of the year. That start has dragged down the overall points percentage by a considerable margin. Since then, Edmonton has played to a 17-5-2 record which is a P% of .750.
If you impose that current pace on the remaining 43 games on the schedule, that would mean that the Oilers would gain about 64 of the remaining 86 points available, putting their total end of season total at around 115 points, which would be the third-best mark in franchise history and the best since the 80s.
That, however, is the best-case scenario and it would take a lot of good luck for the team to continue to click at such a high percentage for the remainder of the season. Instead, the more realistic approach would be to focus on the 110-point range. For that to happen, the Oilers would need to gain 59 points over the last 43 games, meaning they would need a P% of .686 to get there, just a tad over what they have as a total right now. Given how well they’ve played, fairly reasonable to expect.
The Oilers have put themselves in a much better position than last year and are looking every bit like the Stanley Cup Finalists they were last season. If they can continue to play to their potential, nobody should doubt that this team could hit at least 110 points by the time the season ends.