SportsHockeyOilers

Winless Oilers shake up lines after slow start to season

Preston Hodgkinson
Preston Hodgkinson
|
Oct 16 2023, 5:51 pm
Winless Oilers shake up lines after slow start to season
James Guillory/USA TODAY Sports

The winless Edmonton Oilers are making some changes at the top of their lineup.

Head coach Jay Woodcroft tweaked his lines at practice this morning ahead of tomorrow’s game in Nashville, according to TSN’s Ryan Rishaug. The defensive pairs appear to be unchanged.

The biggest change sees Leon Draisaitl being moved up to the first line with Connor McDavid and Evander Kane. Warren Foegele has been promoted to the second line, now centred by Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, with Zach Hyman on the other wing.

New addition Connor Brown has now been shifted down a line to the third line with Dylan Holloway and Ryan McLeod.

Mattias Janmark is centring the fourth line between Adam Erne and Derek Ryan.

Oilers fans are very familiar with the Draisaitl-McDavid pairing.

Last season, the pair played 550 minutes together at even strength, scoring 58% of the goals while they were on the ice together.

It seems that Woodcroft is trying to avoid playing the pair together when he can in an attempt to spread the offensive wealth onto multiple lines. However, considering the team has just one even-strength goal through the first two games of the season, this could be an attempt to jumpstart some offence.

The move means that Nugent-Hopkins will take over as the team’s second-line centre. He is coming off a career year that saw him record 104 points. He’s had a quick start to the season as well with three points, which is tied with McDavid and Draisaitl for the team lead.

Having Foegele jump up as his winger is a peculiar one. The team seems to be having trouble finishing scoring chances and that appears to be a problem Foegele has dealt with for a few seasons now. A good recent example of this is a Vancouver goal on Saturday that was caused by Foegele missing the net with a shot off the rush.

Moving Brown to the third line in his place makes some degree of sense. Brown is coming off an injury-plagued season and hasn’t looked quite himself to start the season. Having him play fewer minutes against lesser competition might help him get up to speed.

It will be interesting to see if some changes are also made to the team’s penalty killers as they have struggled quite a bit to start the season as well.

Edmonton will be back on the ice on Tuesday night at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville to take on the Predators.

ADVERTISEMENT