- Edmonton allowed 4.33 goals per game in the playoffs, more than any of the other 15 teams that qualified
- Darnell Nurse is gone and the Oilers are carrying three goalies on NHL deals
- Read below for what Connor Murphy says went wrong
No playoff team gave up goals last spring the way the Oilers did.
Edmonton answered by trading its longest-serving defenseman and stacking three goalies in the crease.
NHL.com’s 32-in-32 series reached Edmonton this week, and Derek Van Diest built it around the hole Edmonton spent all summer trying to patch. The Oilers finished 25th in goals against during the regular season at 3.23 per game. Then they surrendered 4.33 per game in a six-game first-round loss to Anaheim, the worst rate of any team in the bracket.
Connor Murphy was asked what went wrong defensively.
“I think we got outplayed in a way that we did give up a lot of goals and a lot of them were breakdowns for us giving up a lot of Grade-A chances, and our penalty kill not performing very well and giving up a lot of goals that way too. That is a priority for any team, I don’t think that’s something that’s hard to figure out.”
Stan Bowman’s answer was to move the defenseman who had logged the hardest minutes. Nurse went to San Jose on July 1 after 11 full seasons in Edmonton, with Shakir Mukhamadullin coming back the other way. Ryan Shea signed a five-year, $20 million contract that same week.
Bowman walked through all of it that afternoon:
Evan Bouchard, Jake Walman, Mattias Ekholm, Murphy, Spencer Stastney, Ty Emberson and Mukhamadullin now split what Nurse used to carry.
Bouchard is the piece nobody in Edmonton is worried about. He came in 10th on NHL Network’s Top 20 Defensemen Right Now list, holding the same spot he had a year ago.
The crease got a teardown too. Tristan Jarry went 9-6-2 with a 3.86 goals-against average and an .858 save percentage in 19 games after arriving from Pittsburgh, and he started once in the six playoff games.
Edmonton signed Frederik Andersen to a one-year, $2.8 million contract and sent Buffalo a 2028 third-round pick for Devon Levi. All three goalies are expected to share the net.
Andersen played 66 games in a season twice under Mike Babcock in Toronto. He is not expecting that workload again.
“Speaking of my time with ‘Babs,’ I think I played 66 games a couple of years, and I think those days are probably over. But I’m definitely happy to be part of a good goalie rotation and I think we can get a lot out of each other.”
Babcock is Connor McDavid’s sixth head coach in Edmonton and Leon Draisaitl’s eighth. Both captains of the room signed off on the hire in July.
Three goalies can split a season. None of them can fix a penalty kill.
