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It was the spring of 2018, and the Edmonton Oilers were in a royal mess of their own making. Just one year after making a major surge over 100 points and to Game 7 of the Pacific Division Finals, it all came apart at the seams. That season the Oilers collapsed from 8th place overall to 25th, largely due to a major failure of the special teams. Foremost among them, a talented powerplay unit that somehow crashed to 31st and last in the NHL with a measly 31 powerplay goals, 7 fewer than any other NHL squad. They also ranked 31st in powerplay conversion percentage and PP goals per 60.
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It’s not that they didn’t have offensive talent. In what was to become a familiar refrain, Leon Draisaitl led the team in powerplay goals, but with a paltry 6. League scoring champion Connor McDavid sniped 5, followed by Ryan Nugent-Hopkins with 4, though largely from the second unit. First unit regulars Milan Lucic and Mark Letestu each netted 3, while blueliners Oscar Klefbom and Ethan Bear each scored exactly once.
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The club already had the high end forwards who continue to be the “3” in the club’s 1-3-1 PP alignment, but with nothing positive to show for it. My recollection is of the peerless McDavid already showing his still-unmatched ability to gain the zone, but being largely stapled to the half-wall once possession was established in the dominant strategy of the day. The right-shooting Letestu set up in the left circle for one-timers that rarely found the range that season, while Klefbom was learning the ropes on the point in the extended absence of Andrej Sekera. Lucic was the first choice for the net-front role, but completely lost the powerplay magic he had enjoyed the previous season.
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Days after season’s end, most of the coaching staff took the fall. Todd McLellan held on as head man, at least in the short term, but assistants Jim Johnson and Ian Herbers got the axe. Jay Woodcroft was reassigned to Bakersfield Condors where two other coaches were let go. It was the largest single-day purge of coaches in franchise history. As I wrote at the time:
While McLellan took pains to point out that each special team is the responsibility of the entire coaching staff rather than one man, Woodcroft’s reputation as a powerplay whiz took a massive hit this past season when the Oilers finished dead last in the NHL in both powerplay goals and conversion rate.
The purge had been in the works for a while before it was announced. A full week earlier, my Cult of Hockey colleague Kurt Leavins had raised the name of an interesting candidate who had hit the market shortly after season’s end:
Seconds after the Flames fired their head coach and staff, I speculated on Twitter that Glen Gulutzan would be an almost ideal deputy for Todd McLellan. The 2 men know one another, have a good relationship, apparently have a lot in common, and are both Saskatchewan guys. Glen Gulutzan is also of a different generation, perhaps equipped to help a “communication problem” that I’m told existed on the Oilers bench.
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It took a few weeks to work out the details, but on May 24 the hiring of Gulutzan along with defensive assistant Trent Yawney became official.
Gulutzan’s extensive NHL résumé had all been accumulated in the Western Conference, and most of it in Western Canada. He was head coach in both Dallas and Calgary, sandwiching a stretch as an assistant in Vancouver.
In Edmonton he took his place in a subordinate role, and there he has remained despite all kinds of turmoil in the coaching ranks. He worked first under McLellan, then interim coach Ken Hitchcock in the chaotic 2018-19 campaign. The following year a new GM took the reins in Ken Holland with a new head coach in Dave Tippett; the new brain trust parted ways with assistants Yawney and Manny Viveiros, but Gulutzan remained. He has subsequently endured two more sweeping changes that saw Woodcroft and defensive assistant Dave Manson hired as a tandem, then dismissed together 21 months later. Each time his own name surfaced as a potential candidate for the head job, but it never happened.
This past November Kris Knoblauch would become the fifth head coach during Gulutzan’s six years here, and Paul Coffey the fourth defensive assistant over that same span. Through it all, Gully has not only survived, but thrived.
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There’s one obvious reason for that. The powerplay unit he has coached throughout his time here quickly climbed the ranks of the league’s elite units, surging from worst to first within two seasons and persisting among the NHL’s best ever since. These numbers speak for themselves, especially the red ones indicating league rankings:
- Sources: nhl.com and naturalstattrick.com.
The first such rankings are of opportunity, expressed here as average powerplay time per game. This is one area the Oilers haven’t fared particularly well over the years, in fact they’ve been outside the top 10 every year during the McDavid Era and in the lower half of the league every season but one. For whatever reason, the Oilers have always had trouble drawing an excess of opportunities with the man advantage. Moreover, they have a tendency to end powerplays quickly, by scoring.
The other categories listed all bear happier news about the actual production of the unit, expressed 4 different ways:
- powerplay goals per game;
- powerplay goals per 60 minutes with the man advantage;
- gross conversion rate of powerplay opportunities to goals for; and
- net conversion rate discounting shorthanded goals against.
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The numbers reflect the rapid recovery of Edmonton’s PP from the smoking crater that was its 2017-18 performance. Top half of the league in Gulutzan’s first season, then straight to #1 in all 4 categories in his second. That same quartet of top rankings was repeated in 2021 and again in 2022-2023.
That last was the year the group set an NHL record for efficiency at 32.4%, while becoming the only team in the last 15 seasons to average as much as 1 powerplay goal per game played. A fairly common feat during the whistle-happy years following the Shanahan Summit when powerplays were nearly twice as common as now, but in modern terms it was off-the-charts. Indeed, in the 15-season period 2009-24, Edmonton’s 89 powerplay goals in ’22-23 were s staggering 10 more than second-place Washington Capitals in 2009-10, and 15 more than third-place Tampa Bay’s 74 in 2018-19. Both of those teams won the Presidents’ Trophy.
A common element to all three of those units? Continuity.
The Caps duo of Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom ran roughshod over NHL penalty killers for years, first with Mike Green on the point, later John Carlson. A decade later came the Lightning with their lethal combination of Steven Stamkos, Nikita Kucherov, Brayden Point and Victor Hedman. Same guys running the show for years for both teams, still are in the case of the Bolts. And in the world of NHL specialty teams, familiarity breeds powerplay goals.
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The Oilers have also enjoyed continuity within their first unit, especially along the middle 3 where McDavid, Draisaitl and RNH have worked their magic since about 5 minutes after Glen Gulutzan took charge. Turns out they were way better when playing together on the same unit. Who knew?
Six years later, that trio is still playing on the same unit, and their familiarity with each other is extremely well-developed. Over the years the club has gradually fleshed out the rest of the unit. Zach Hyman provided a boost in the net-front/puck retrieval role since his arrival in 2021, a clear upgrade from the likes of Lucic, Alex Chiasson and James Neal. The lone point man evolved from Oscar Klefbom through Tyson Barrie and now to Evan Bouchard, a very gifted attacker with a bomb of a shot. Edmonton’s first unit is absolutely stacked with terrific powerplay specialists in every spot.
Draisaitl has emerged as the primary finisher, his measly 6 PPG in 2017-18 surging to 16, 16 and 15 goals in the 3 seasons that followed before boiling over to 24, 32 and 21 in the the most recent 3. No other NHLer has so much as averaged 15 powerplay goals a season over that span, whereas Leon hit that mark as a minimum in each of those seasons. For his part, McDavid has found another level as a playmaker, scoring 205 powerplay assists over that span, Nikita Kucherov ranking a distant second with 157. The McDavid-Draisatl axis ranks 1-2 in the NHL powerplay scoring by a wide margin.
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Terrific talent to be sure. In fairness, though, part of the unit’s continuity can be traced to the coach who has been in charge of that specialty team for the entire span. Glen Gulutzan has modernized the systems and redeployed his biggest weapon. Still a master of zone entry, McDavid has been unchained from the half wall and given free rein to roam in the offensive zone, here, there, everywhere, opening lanes and opportunities with his sublime speed and skill. Draisaitl is commonly found in McD’s old spot in the right circle where he has become a deadly executioner. RNH occupies the other circle and while neither a right shot nor the possessor of a quick release, has lived up to his original reputation as a “powerplay witch” with his deft puck movement.
While admittedly no expert on systems play, to these eyes the powerplay has been re-imagined in Gulutzan’s time to play to the strengths of the players on hand rather than stick to a formula that didn’t really work for this group.
How about in the playoffs?
Pretty hard to argue with results like these:
Not much continuity in playoff appearances by the team until the last 5 springs, so we show just those, the Gulutzan years. Obviously results from 2024 are incomplete, even as they are highly impressive to this point.
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The unit had one poor showing in 2021, when Connor Hellebuyck posted a .950 save percentage over a 4-game sweep that saw the Oilers firing blanks in all manpower situations. But in other years the Oil were comfortably in the top half of the league in all categories, frequently in the top 3 if not #1. That one Winnipeg series aside, the unit has been a consistent threat that has produced a significant share of Edmonton’s overall offence in the postseason. If you don’t believe me, ask the Los Angeles Kings.
Stands to reason that this elite special team will continue to be a focal point in the series to come, with opponents doing their level best to stay out of the box. Next up, the Vancouver Canucks.
Oilers-Canucks to start Wednesday
At long last the schedule for Round 2 is out, along with an explanation of what the holdup was.
So as luck has it, Dallas goes right back at it with a new opponent, Colorado, after just a single day off, though at least without travel. Fans of the Oilers and Canucks, meanwhile, will have to grin and bear it for a further day before the puck finally drops on Wednesday night, a full week after Edmonton’s clinching win over Los Angeles. From there it is every other night for as long as it takes one of the sides to win 4 games.
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