Edmonton Oilers

he Bullet Train Out of Town
May 20, 2017, 2:34 PM ET [69 Comments]
Matt Henderson
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The Oilers experienced more regular season success than they have in over two decades, made it to the 2nd round of the playoffs, and the future of the team is bright according to anyone with a cursory knowledge of hockey. And yet old habits die hard, so naturally all the talk surrounding this team is about shipping out a skill player for pennies on the dollar.

This time around it’s Jordan Eberle in the sights of Oiler Nation. The smaller, offensively minded top 6 winger is on a bullet train out of town based on the radio chatter. There’s no doubt that Eberle had a tough season and an even tougher playoffs. The question that everyone seems to be asking is if Eberle is the kind of player you can win with in the playoffs.

I think it’s important to take a step backwards with this one. We can acknowledge that Eberle wasn’t good enough in the playoffs without determining that he will never be good playoffs ever. There are many players who weren’t effective in the playoffs at least once and went on to be regular contributors.

It’s true that Eberle didn’t show a lot of jam. He wasn’t particularly gritty. He wasn’t very strong against the boards in his own zone. However, those qualities have never been big parts of his game. I’m not worried that he wasn’t involved in scrums so much as I’m worried that he wasn’t showing any quickness in his game and he wasn’t shooting enough.

Eberle had the 2nd most shots on the team in the regular season (208), averaging roughly 2.5 per game. In the playoffs, Eberle had the 6th most shots (22), just 1.69 shots per game. Eberle’s best quality as an NHL player is his ability to create and finish chances. Finishing is sometimes a little luck, but he’s a career 13% shooter and we should have expected a couple goals from him over those 22 shots. Things happen, sometimes you just don’t get the bounces. It’s more concerning to me that he lost almost a shot per game in the playoffs.

One of the things that is the hardest to accept when we observe hockey is the role luck plays in scoring or preventing goals. We have a very difficult time (fans, analysts, General Managers) in separating process and results. When defenders have fantastic on-ice save percentages, which aren’t in their control at all, we say they were fantastic defensively – regardless of how they actually played in front of the goalie. When players are experiencing sky high shooting percentages we say they’ve broken through and we start to expect more offense from them all the time.

It’s a trap we all fall into. It’s why people will be upset when Maroon scores fewer goals next year or can’t fathom moving on from Tyler Pitlick after he scored so frequently early in the season. It’s why people continue to claim Russell was fantastic defensively despite all the evidence to the contrary.

When it comes to Jordan Eberle, fans are ready to label him a complete waste a $6 million dollars and the type of player that we can’t win with moving forward. If we try to look at the process and not the percentage driven results then we can be critical without allowing some bad luck to completely derail our analysis.

One of the things that’s interesting to me is that the Oiler forward actually increased his shooting in the regular season on a per 60 minute basis. From 2012 to 2016 Eberle shot the puck 7.19 times per 60 minutes while playing 5v5. This past season he shot it 8.30 times per 60 minutes during 5v5 play. However, at the same time, his shooting percentage dropped from 12.42% to 8.97%. If we “normalize” this season’s even strength shooting percentage to the average of his previous 4 seasons then we should have expected Eberle score an extra 5 goals. And that’s without touching the Power Play.

So it’s true that Eberle struggled this year to reach the scoring levels he has in the past, but I think we can see it’s very likely he will rebound. The shooting rates were there and he’s not at the age where we start to expect sharp declines. I am still comfortable saying that Eberle is a 25 goal scorer moving forward and someone who ought to be in the 55-60 point range perennially. It’s with that valuation that we need to keep him when we consider the possibility of moving him.

The crazies that suggest exposing him in expansion are out to lunch. Trading him away for a bucket of foam pucks and some tape are just as crazy. I recognize fully that his $6 million dollar price tag is hefty, but even in this down year he was ranked 21st in NHL scoring by right wingers. That’s top line territory and he’s playing on Edmonton’s 2nd line. If the Oilers are going to trade him then they need something of comparable value, like a legitimate top 4 defender.

The rumour du-jour is Eberle for Demers in Florida. The basics of the deal make some sense. Demers was of interest enough to the team to have been invited to tour the new arena last summer. He’s a right shooting defender who has a track record of producing a decent amount of offense 5v5 and was a possession positive player in both Dallas and San Jose. His offensive totals have never been high enough to label him an offensive defender, but he looks like a solid two way defender.

In both San Jose and Dallas, Demers kept the unblocked shot attempts low while not sacrificing the unblocked shot attempts for. Contrast this with Kris Russell, who kept the events low against, but was dead last on the defense when it came to creating the same events for. This year in Florida, however, Demers was low on both sides of the ledger.

If he’s truly available, the question for a team like the Oilers will be about whether the low events for while Demers was on the ice was just an anomaly or the beginning of a trend. In any event, if the Oilers do make that kind of a deal with Jordan Eberle, the team will still be left without a high-end offensive RW. The built-in replacement of the future is Jesse Puljujarvi, but there’s no telling where his development will take him or how long it will be before he’s able to impact the game offensively like Eberle, if ever.

We have to remember that just because he didn’t scoring a goal in the playoffs it doesn’t mean he’s useless and can be replaced by just about anyone. That kind of thinking is a good way to give away a pretty important cog in the Oiler offense for nothing.