Edmonton Oilers Talk: Draisaitl’s Defensive Presence This Season a Mirage? Maybe So Suggests Oilers Insider

As I do every weekday after I wake up, I threw on the day’s edition of Oilers Now and started my routine. The show’s been a bit blah with regards to writeable material recently but this morning Sportsnet’s Mark Spector and host Bob Stauffer went toe-to-toe on a couple of topics,

1. Leon Draisaitl’s improved defense.
2. Evan Bouchard’s blunder that lead to Winnipeg’s GWG last night.

Quickly on Evan Bouchard.

He’s been fantastic so far, but not without his warts. Spector is absolutely right in his criticism of the young defender on Wheeler’s goal. Spec also notes that these are the things everybody will have to go through with Bouchard in the lineup. There are just certain aspects of the game that can only be learned by experience. Evan is a very intelligent hockey player and there’s no doubt in my mind, he’ll figure it out.

Getting to Leon now. Take a listen to this segment and let me know if I’m off base with regards to my conclusion. Jump ahead to the 6:35-ish mark.

Now, it’s my understanding from what I heard that Spector was praising the upgrade in Draisaitl’s two-way game, and to my surprise, Stauffer was the one suggesting the German MVP’s newfound defensive prowess could be an illusion.

“The save percentage has worked to his advantage. His PDO, which is the combined team save percentage when he’s on the ice versus the team’s shot percentage that the team gets on goal. His current PDO is at 107.7, that’s part of the reason he’s +11. He’s at 50% Corsi, 52.2% Fenwick and when he was in the depths of what he was going through last December which sunk his plus/minus, a stretch where the Oilers gave up a bunch of goals while they were on the PP, the best PP in 40 years which is the falacy of why plus/minus is a bad stat.

At the time he was on the wing, they were struggling and once him, Nugent-Hopkins, and Yamamoto went on a pretty good heater with decent-to-good metrics, but off the chart shooting percentage and that’s what spiked the plus/minus when he got moved into the middle.

The irony is, you’re talking about a team where they’re actually not as good, they’re nowhere near as good defensively~ They went into last night’s game, Mark, 23rd in goals against. They finished 16th in the league last year, they’re actually better last year that they were to start the year, but Draisaitl’s got a little bit of a deceptive +11 because he’s got some puck luck going his way. The faceoff percentage, he’s up from last year, so he’s got to get credit for that. That’s something he’s continued to work on, but he was at 52.1% last year, now he’s at 52.8%.”

That’s a lot of plus/minus talk to describe how well a player is doing defensively, eh? The reason they were talking about that is that Stauffer assumed that Spector thought Draisaitl’s defensive game has improved because his plus/minus was better than last season. If you remember, Leon was a minus player in 2019/20.

But how about we simply take a look at Leon’s “against” metrics relative 5v5 from last season to this one to date?

Some other things you’ll notice if you go to that link above is that Draisaitl is drawing penalties at double the rate he was last year, he’s cut down his giveaways by more than two times, increased his hits by more than 1.5 per sixty and he’s nearly doubled his blocked shots.

So that tells me he’s sacrificing the offensive parts of his game for the defensive ones. I mean, you can just look at the numbers I’ve just posted and come to the conclusion that he’s a better defensive player and it’s substantial. I look at that information and wonder if the Oilers finally have a Selke Trophy winner on their hands.

Can you discern if that’s down to luck though? I don’t know if you can, to be honest. To determine that, we’re going to have to re-visit these numbers at the end of next month. The season will be more than half-finished by then and we’ll have a better idea for sure.

For now though, I’m not ready to say that Leon’s enhanced defensive game is a mirage, you?