Are the Edmonton Oilers pretenders or contenders? Tonight's game vs Los Angeles Kings is a tell

Are the Edmonton Oilers pretenders or contenders? Tonight’s game vs the Los Angeles Kings is a tell.

Last year, the Edmonton Oilers didn’t come close to consistently playing championship defence. It was the worst defensive team that we’ve seen in the past six seasons. It was a team with pretences of turning it on and winning the Cup, but it failed to come close to doing so.

Will this year be any different? Edmonton’s still got amazing attacking prowess, so it’s going to come down to how well the Oilers defend, just as it has since 2021-22.

These six seasons under Jay Woodcroft and Kris Knoblauch represent the peak of the McDavid/Draisaitl era, when the team clearly had enough high-powered scoring talent to win the Stanley Cup.

The problem has been that Edmonton failed to consistently get championship quality goaltending out of its netminders, or championship quality defence out of its position players.

Essentially, the team consistently gave up too many high quality Grade A shots against to dominate defensively in the most critical of Stanley Cup games.

What is championship quality defence?

What do I mean by championship quality defence? Last year the average NHL team gave up 2.88 goals per game.

You could define a quality game as anything less than 2.88 goals per game, but I’m setting the bar higher than that to championship level defence. I’ll suggest that if a team is playing at that highest level, it will allow less than 2.5 goals in a game.

If we take the goalie out of the equation, and look at how many quality shots a team gives up, a team playing that highest level of defence will give up shots against with an expected goals against of less than 2.5 goals against per game.

The Oilers attained this high level of defensive excellence in 29 out of 82 regular season games last year.

But they’ve been able to do so in three out of five games this year, including in Edmonton’s 3-1 win over San Jose on Saturday. In that game, the Oilers had the lowest expected goals against, just 1.2, that I have tracked for Edmonton all of this season and last season.

Even with all of San Jose’s top young talent, the best the Sharks could do was launch high slot shot on Tristan Jarry, save for one break-in chance.

It was a brilliant defensive performance by the Oilers, but even last year they had a number of outstanding games on defence, no fewer than 15 with an expected goals against of less than 2.0 per game.

Heading into tonight’s game, the Kings rank 25th out of 32 NHL teams when it comes to scoring. That said, the team has some dangerous shooters in players like Artemi Panarin and Adrian Kempe.

There’s much excitement in Edmonton just now over Mike Babcock’s Oilers, undefeated in regulation, but for me the most exciting thing by far was that shut down defensive performance in San Jose.

Can Edmonton do it again? Can they do it night after night? That’s what it’s going to take for this particular team to win the Stanley Cup.

Running off a string of four or five games in a row of championship defence just now would be a statement these Oilers aren’t pretenders, but they’re in the running to be champs.