The Edmonton Oilers could continue to leave goals on the table during Connor McDavid's minutes

The point in the season where early trends can be drawn from underlying on-ice numbers has either arrived, or will soon, depending on the observer. 

This event approaches quicker in the case of a player like Connor McDavid, who is 2nd in all situations ice-time for forwards, Nth at 5v5. It's a smaller fraction of what his total body of work will be in this season, but at about 250 5v5 minutes, the activity so far in his minutes (when it comes to shot-based events) has some weight to it.

Which is why it could become troubling that his 5v5 goal generation hasn't really gotten up to speed yet. McDavid appears, to the eye, to be an even better player than he's been before. He's intercepting pucks, saving goals on the back-check, maneuvering around obstruction at even higher levels than his previous, already game-breaking standard. 

However, the puck hasn't gone in the net nearly as much as during his entry-level deal. In Connor McDavid's rookie year, he had an on-ice goals per hour rate of 3.39, and 2.73 points per hour. In the next, those marks were 3.51 and 2.87. Last year: 3.62 and 3.17. 

In this recent section, the fall of 2018, the goals-for rate has been 2.76, and his point rate 2.30.

He has 10 5v5 points, good for 31st in the NHL.

He and Nugent-Hopkins are still smashing their minutes against the toughest competition in the NHL, with a goal-share over 60%, but it comes under a both-ways opposite set of conditions, where the on-ice shooting percentage is lower and the on-ice save percentage is higher than his career norm.

The pair earns a lot of their defensive results - they smother their unblocked shot-attempts against rate down to 39 per hour. For context, that's a rate where, if they were just a average-level outfit, you'd expect they were playing against third liners. They help drive the most deadly offensive competition to generate below-average offense. It's quite the development.

They won't get quite the save-percentage they're getting right now (RNH is 24th of 334 forwards with more than 100 minutes-played in on-ice save percentage), but it's reasonable - especially with the stellar contributions of the top defense pairing, to not expect regression to pull them all the way to previous career levels given acceptable goaltending.

The shooting percentage part is the problem, and to what degree can we expect that to correct on its own? To McDavid's career average? An average top-sixers average? 

I'm a believer that, in larger samples, you earn your shooting percentage with a combination of finishing talent and opportunity generation - weighted towards opportunity generation. When I refer to the danger of the opportunities, I'm speaking not to any current, public 'expected goals'  or 'high danger' concept, but to the more unique aspects of scoring chances like screens set and puck movement (which is why I lean on video so often).

However, many scoring woes are from lack of on-paper opportunities, and due to the nature of being able to research this area much quicker, it should be the first to be investigated.

Of our sample with McDavid, we can chop it up into smaller samples and see if there's a universal-ish trend of lower shooting percentage, and if not, with which teammates the puck isn't going in - and where it's coming from. The three samples we have at forward are the Rattie version, the Yamamoto version and the Caggiula version. On defense, the top two pairings play most of the game - more on that later. 

But first, here's the rundown on Connor McDavid's usual impact:

(Warning: the rest of this article is basically a picture-book.)

Left-point drives, and endless dangerous plays to the slot by the most potent even-strength weapon of the salary-cap NHL. This is what you should expect from a Connor McDavid shot-map, because he's almost always playing with a left-shot Dman who loves to shoot, and he's always either going outside-in on defencemen or making no-look passes to the slot.

With Ty Rattie

FF/60 - 55.59

GF/60 - 2.36

This, this is not good. Over half of the high danger area is deep-blue, with just as much deep-red further than 40 feet from the goal line as there is closer. The twin spots at poor angles, near both corners, aren't a great sign either because of how often missing the net there kills a play, and hitting it just forces a face-off.

There's not much here that leads one to expect their shooting percentage together will spontaneously rebound, it will have to follow change in approach. These three players are capable of much more than this, as evidenced by their two and some hours last year at 5v5 resulting in 6.06 GF/60, shooting 18.57%. Attempting to get chances off from where they did last year would be a good start:

With Kailer Yamamoto

FF/60 - 66.41

GF/60 - 0.95

Kailer Yamamoto has been on the most frustrating offensive line this team has deployed for two years in a row. The self-repairing dam does not seem to break, despite there always appearing to be a game with 3 or more 5v5 goals-for on the horizon. It's one thing for the 20 year-old rookie not to finish on opportunities as if he were a veteran, but the two veteran forwards on the line, both of career shooting percentages above 10%, to suddenly be unable to finish on jailbreak chances and plays with numbers or wide-open nets. Completely baffling. You get the idea that they'd eventually light on fire, but the question is how many games - losses you can't afford - would go by before that happened. This is the area where I'd turn to video. Regardless, there isn't a readily apparent tweak to make in terms of the process with this line. I'm inclined to think that they got unlucky (again), and that it's mixed in with some legitimate lack of finishing touch by the youngest member. Soon, Yamamoto.

With Drake Caggiula

FF/60 - 53.42

GF/60 - 2.74

I'm greatly enjoying the process of being wrong on this player, though he still negatively impacted the defensive zone time on this line, he's been much better in his own end against depth competition where he should be, and has pulled his weight in goals when up here. His version of this line is the highest event and some of his deficiencies are covered up by this Selke version of Connor McDavid paired with the responsible Nugent-Hopkins, but this is another variation of the line where the only on-paper red flag is its actual shooting percentage - this time with a player whose percentage has been almost triple this in earlier auditions, granting an even higher likelihood of regression to a more flattering number. It's tempting to return to this well if the Rattie combination's struggles continue and the 20 year-olds stay on the farm. The incredible suppression abilities of the 97 & 93 pair appear to float even anchors of previous years - though Drake's individual coverage issues are improving.

…

So, among the forward variations the Rattie deployment sticks out. They're capable of generating more dangerous opportunities, doing so as recently as last spring. Having a dive in shot volume and shot quality is very suppressive for goal generation obviously, and to be frank, unless one or both issues are remedied we're looking at a sub 3.0 goal per hour line outside of heaters.

Blueline Company

The defence group plays with McDavid in a very formulaic way. As we all know, Oscar Klefbom and Adam Larsson have been the premier pairing, after a short try of Darnell Nurse and Matt Benning for the second pairing Kris Russell has replaced Benning, and the third pairing is some combination of Evan Bouchard, Matt Benning, Kevin Gravel, and Jason Garrison.

The top pairing plays half the game, the second pairing gets close, and the third pairing gets the diet-scraps like they're Matt Irwin and Yannick Weber or whoever that was on the Cup Final Nashville blueline. Or the Sharks one from the year before. Or Chicago's before that. The point is, this defence corps operates like they're 20 games deep in the Western Conference Stanley Cup Playoffs while in actuality this is the first dozen or so games of the year.

This translates to the McDavid minutes quite literally. Connor McDavid plays 8:18 per game with Klefbom, 5:52 5v5 per game with Nurse, 2:03 with neither.

Things are about to get real interesting here, and seemingly we're presented with the heart of the problem.

With Darnell Nurse

FF/60 - 38.57

GF/60 - 1.26

A little extra context before we get started here - McDavid has spent 21 and 18 minutes separately with each of Nurse and Russell, respectively, where their FF/60 both raise to the 45 per hour range. Their minutes, all three together, are worse but considering McDavid's minutes away generate 60 FF/60, that's a massive decrease in shot generation and an equally massive increase in shot quality would have to follow in order to break even.

The problem there is that they're getting lesser opportunities in both quality and quantity, just like we observed in the Rattie variation, which prompts me to see if there's a significant overlap. 

The results: McDavid and Rattie fare better in quantity generation away from Nurse than with him, but the rate is still rather poor for a McDavid unit. Each doesn't shift blame fully to the other, but the current second pairing has a universal dampening on McDavid's offense.

By eye, the pairing spends a ton of time defending, so it's important to find out if the lack of shot quantity is tied to the lack of offensive zone time. This appears to be the case - McDavid and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins experience a shots-against and unblocked shots-against increase by over ten per hour.

Trouble getting out of the defensive zone, coupled with trouble creating once you get out. We're looking at an item of devastating potential consequence.

I want to stress the newness of this issue. Among Nurses numerous successes last season, he particularly excelled among the defensemen playing with McDavid. There was a mutually benefit for both players, as opposed to Connor dragging another along.

Their are perhaps problems with the health of one or more of these players or deployment differences (doubtful given Nurses' monster minute totals last year), but if it is neither then we're looking at a combination of poor execution and ideal.

Given that McDavid is both the player with the most execution consistency on the planet and the one with the highest difficulty threshold (by that I mean he can make a better play than any other player could at any given time and what he can't do, no one can do), the blame could reasonably shifted onto what the current goals are during offensive zone play.

On the other pairings

There's a reasonable question to be asked here It's that since the Klefbom-Larsson pairing has been so stellar, could they be covering up for the forwards lack of polish in some of the aforementioned areas?

The answer is an encouraging one - McDavid's been at around career on-ice goals-for per-hour (3.30+) during the minutes with Oscar Klefbom and Adam Larsson, and during the third-pairing minutes. Obviously, accounting for competition and context, that the top-pairing does so is more impressive, but it also isolates the problem to the minutes spent with that troubling second pair.

And on the hidden missed value

Here's a point I've wanted to get to - that the goals-for rate not dropping in third-pairing minutes isn't actually an achievement. 

Actually, there's room for substantial improvement there.

Those who've followed the development of player-rating models and the general advancement of statistical evaluation for individual defencemen know about the paradigm of the Sheltered Defenceman.

Ever since the popularisation of Corsi-for Relative to Team, defencemen fed offensive zone starts with good teammates against poor competition and other opportunities (most recently uncovered were on-the-fly shift starts against 'tired' opposition where OZ possession was previously established, via The Athletic's Tyler Dellow this summer) have appeared on paper to be greater individual contributors than they actually were.

What this means is, a lot of good team's most deadly minutes feature a skill line accompanied by a varying-levels-of-sheltered D-man who can move the puck and create danger in the offensive zone:

(The following are some of the endless examples of a defense pairing seemingly making a forwards line better offensively, which is more likely due to a combination of deployment context and using players who have skill with the puck on their stick in order to truly sink their teeth into the softest available minutes - those that are available to any team, but are exploited to varying levels)

This is the optimal alignment for a defense corps that usually has a group of players that have varying levels of ability offensively and defensively that likely includes the ubiquitous defenseman that has all the distributive offensive skill and creativity in the world but can't handle the heavier minutes due to youth or skating or any other unfortunate (for NHL hockey) attribute.

The Oilers don't have this currently - their third pairing plus skill line combinations not only don't score at a superior rate to their shares with the top pairing despite an assumed lower level of competition and favourable circumstances, but not much ice-time has been seen by any variation. 

A lowered level of ice-time for a pairing featuring a teenager could be expected, but even after Evan Bouchards demotion and in the games during where he didn't dress the third pairing has played little. Over the season, an Oilers average of 47 minutes 5v5 per game has been divided up into a baseline of two 18-minute top-4 pairings and a 10-minute third, plus some loose shifts.

Here's a look (using a rough measure) across the some of the league's current playoff standings landscape for comparison -

• The Boston Bruins run 17 / / 15 / / 13
• The Calgary Flames run 16 / / 16 / / 13
• The Columbus Blue Jackets run 16 / / 16 / / 13
• The Minnesota Wild run 17 / / 15 / / 14
• The Montreal Canadiens run 16 / / 15 / / 14
• The Nashville Predators run 17 / / 16 / / 12
• The Tampa Bay Lightning run 16 / / 16 / / 13
• The Toronto Maple Leafs run 16 / / 15 / / 14

Some of these teams have holes or talent discrepancies on the third pairing yet still achieve a more balanced distribution of ice-time between their pairings than the Edmonton Oilers.

This is a two birds with one stone scenario. You shore up the third pairing, they generate offense in their McDavid minutes better, and take time away from the overworked Nurse-Russell duo.

Closing

To recap, we've found a few problem areas and a few possible solutions:

1. Benning (who the coaching staff trust) needs to accompany a left-shot defenceman who the coaching staff also trust to form a pairing that the coaching staff trusts in order to better weaponise the more dangerous shifts the team earns.
2. Nurse-Russell + the McDavid line need to both break out more cleanly and look to generate more dangerous opportunities. Easier said than done, but breaking out cleaner was something Nurse improved on last year, and McDavid's lines have generated more offense than this no matter who's been on the ice.
3. If the Nugent-Hopkins-McDavid-Rattie line is to stay together, they too need to focus on pace and threat in the offensive zone. Their shooting percentage woes are not going to regress entirely on their own if current shot rates and location continue. This issue is also not tied into the second pairing, but is its own independent problem.

The popular hypothetical move is going out and acquiring a second-pairing, right-shot defenceman. The last time that happened at this time of year, it costed Adam Henrique. The third pairing leftie problem also doesn't have a good internal option at this point, because calling up Caleb Jones would simply result in more 10 minute nights for the pairing - though they would  have a chance to be more dangerous in them.

This team will need to win high-event minutes when McDavid's on the ice in order to pile the largest possible amount of goals for the rest of the team to inevitably burn through. The opposite motion of forcing low-event minutes when he's on the bench is already in place, as the Oilers sit at the 7th lowest goals-against rate at 5-on-5.

I won't pretend to know the way forward, but the post-mortem on McDavid's minutes so far comes to the conclusion that there are problems in process that are tied intricately between the overplaying of the second pairing, their inability as a five-man unit to break out cleanly, and release decisions once arriving in the offensive zone.