It's time for Edmonton Oilers to give Jeff Skinner a real chance
The Edmonton Oilers have not looked their best over the past couple of weeks.
They still sit comfortably in a playoff spot and are only four points back of the Vegas Golden Knights for the Pacific Division lead, but it’s been ugly. Edmonton has only three wins over their past 10 games and are coming off the heels of another disappointing loss against the Buffalo Sabres on Monday night.
The goaltending is suspect, the defensive structure is lacking, and, perhaps the most surprising of them all, the offence is sputtering along. For a team that boasts three former 50-goal scorers, finding the back of the net should be the least of their issues.
All of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Vasily Podkolzin, and Viktor Arvidsson have gone quiet of late, which is putting much of the scoring responsibility on Leon Draisaitl, Connor McDavid, and Zach Hyman. If those guys can’t carry the load, the Oilers are probably not scoring.
If only there were a veteran winger who has proven to be a very productive goalscorer when given the opportunity. Oh wait, there is. His name is Jeff Skinner.
For whatever reason, Skinner has not been able to win over the trust of Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch. He started the season in the top six and looked very good early on, but a brief slump was all it took to sink his stock.
He toiled around Edmonton’s bottom six for a while before eventually getting scratched in late December. Ever since, he’s struggled to even get into the lineup on most nights. And that’s despite improved defensive play and recording the fourth-best five-on-five goals-per-60 minutes (0.98) on the team as per Natural Stat Trick (NST), which is ahead of McDavid (0.77) despite only averaging roughly 11:22 minutes per game.
Even with all the healthy scratches, Skinner has still managed to score 11 goals in 54 games, which ranks seventh on the team and is ahead of both Arvidsson and Podkolzin. If scoring is what the Oilers need right now, it makes no sense why Skinner is finding himself out of the lineup on a regular basis.
There are a few spots that Skinner could slot in nicely in the top-six. Perhaps the most needed in on McDavid’s left wing as Nugent-Hopkins has been in a pretty gnarly slump lately. This would give the Oilers captain a pure sniper to dish the puck to on top of Hyman’s net-front presence. NST says that these two have played together for just 64 minutes this season and while the underlying numbers haven’t been pretty, it’s also a fairly small sample size.
Skinner has more minutes with Draisaitl (103) with better results, but again, it is not quite the kind of sample size where you can draw a lot of meaningful trends. The coaching staff seems to love Podkolzin in that second-line spot, but while he does a lot of good things on the forecheck, he isn’t scoring goals. You can argue that Draisaitl himself has been doing just fine, but that defeats the purpose of creating the best possible combination.
He may not have a perfect 200-foot game, but that isn’t what Edmonton’s top-six needs at the moment. They need more goals from their secondary scorers. Even with Skinner having a bit of a down year, the one thing he is still managing to do is score goals. It’s time for the Oilers to give Skinner a stretch of at least four or five games in a top-six role to see if the scoring improves with him playing more minutes with skilled players like Draisaitl or McDavid.
If it works, that will be a major boost for the top end of the lineup. If it doesn’t, you can go back to the drawing board. With the team struggling to get wins, this kind of change seems rather harmless in the grand scheme of things. Either things get better, or they stay the same.
The time to experiment is now, not the playoffs.