February 5, 2026 by Ryan Lotsberg

“We’re a different team, we’re not the same team. Like, we’re not as good right now, we’re not even close, like we need to understand that.”

Leon Draisaitl’s assessment of the Edmonton Oilers essentially sums up their reality for the 2025-26 season. Those words capped an unfiltered availability after the Oilers lost 4-3 to the Calgary Flames, their third loss in a row and second in a row to teams below them in the standings. The loss in Calgary came at the heels of an eight-game homestand that presented an opportunity to firmly assert themselves as Pacific Division leaders. Instead, mediocre play left them with a 4-4 record on that homestand and in second place in the division heading into the Olympic break.

Through a league-high 58 games played, the Oilers have a 28-22-8 record and 64 points. Their 64 points is tied with the Utah Mammoth, who sit in fourth in the Central Division. The Oilers wouldn’t be sitting in a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference right now. 64 points would put them fifth in the Metropolitan Division and sixth in the Atlantic Division. They’re only one point above the Toronto Maple Leafs, who beat the Oilers on Tuesday, and the sky is falling in Toronto. It all adds up to a tie for fourteenth place in the league based on regular points, and eighteenth based on points percentage.

It took these Oilers 55 games to win three games in a row for the first time this season, which ties a franchise high according to Jason Gregor. That singular three-game win streak has been offset by four three-game losing streaks. The current three-game losing streak is the first such streak since late November, so there was a stretch of better play in there; but it has fallen off the rails lately. The Oilers have managed to scrape together a couple of late comeback wins to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat recently, but the quality of play has dwindled since Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’ 1000th NHL game.

The schedule was a valid explanation for the Oilers’ play early in the season. They played 24 of their first 32 games on the road, and they finished their Eastern Conference travel schedule on December 18, which is the earliest they have ever done so. Injuries were a factor in the first half of the season as well when players like Zach Hyman, Jake Walman, and Kasperi Kapanen all spent significant amounts of time injured.

There’s no excuse anymore though. They just had an eight-game homestand. Only one player remains hurt, and that player hasn’t produced much. Adam Henrique is somewhat reliable defensively, but he’s not the point producer he once was at this stage in his career. His absence isn’t killing the team.

Oilers GM Stan Bowman has even addressed the goalie situation. Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard have been replaced by a new tandem, Tristan Jarry and Connor Ingram; yet here we are worrying about how the Oilers can’t keep the puck out of their net.

Draisaitl didn’t mince words after Wednesday’s loss. “We’re just giving up too many goals. I don’t know, we just can’t defend” he said with an exasperated tone. “Penalty kill is not great, but there’s many things that are part of it. Yeah, just not good enough right now.”

Jarry talked about how tough it is when the team is giving up a high volume of high danger chances after losing his last start against the Minnesota Wild on Saturday, but he said that he needs to be better after Wednesday’s loss. Draisaitl said “…[i]t goes hand in hand. We’ve got to defend better. We’ve got to make it easier on him and I’m sure that he can be a little bit better too, you know it’s a two-way street; but it starts with us in front of him and the game becomes a little bit easier for him, but I think there are saves that our goalies need to make at some point.”

Speaking on a more general level about the team’s current reality, Draisaitl philosophized that “…this league is too hard, you know, to just like lollygag through games and try to get winning streaks going, and you need everybody. It starts with coaches, like everybody, like you’re never going to win if you have four or five guys going, and it starts at the top. We can be better, our leaders can be better, and yeah, we’ll take the break and regroup.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that quote. In his “Dear Canada” piece for The Player’s Tribune this week, Connor McDavid said that “[s]ometimes the regular season feels like a grind. I think you’ve seen it in our play this year, in my play. I’m not always proud of that, but I want to be honest here.” 

This is coming from the captain of a team that has lost two consecutive Stanley Cup Finals. It takes everything to get there once, and it’s crushing to lose, especially the way they did in 2024. I can imagine the realization that you have to go through all of that again to get where you want to be would be heavy and daunting. The Oilers are facing that reality for a second season in a row. 

If you want to understand where the lollygagging that Draisaitl referred to on Wednesday comes from, that would be the first place to start. It’s not a lack of desire or “give a $%#!”, it’s just the mental fatigue from the pure monotony of the regular season after having come so close to winning it all and falling short twice. Even as a fan watching, my excitement for and intensity during regular season games has waned because I know what the emotions are like when your team is fighting for a championship. I know what it’s like to watch your team force a deciding Game 7 in the Stanley Cup Final live, and I know what it’s like to be in the building for that Game 7. Regular season games simply don’t compare. I can understand the monotony the players must feel during the regular season, especially in the Oilers’ situation. Empathy isn’t exoneration though.

Draisaitl had a peculiar way of saying that everyone needs to be better. He managed to say that while sending shots all the way to the top of the organization. I applaud the impressive wordsmithing.

Let’s start with the coaching. Head coach Kris Knoblauch has taken a lot of heat for various reasons this season. Some of it is based on accountability, which was touted as a skill of his when he was hired. Andrew Mangiapane had his skating legs under him in the first period of Tuesday’s game against the Leafs. He made a couple of plays on scoring chances, and he was getting under the skin of some Leafs players. However, he got benched in the second period because a turnover in the offensive zone led to a Leafs goal later in the sequence. 

Nobody else has been benched for turnovers in Knoblauch’s tenure. Evan Bouchard was benched earlier in the season not for one of his many egregious turnovers, but for a high-sticking penalty. Darnell Nurse has struggled with poor puck management for most of the season, but he hasn’t been benched. Jake Walman has also struggled with some turnovers and poor decisions recently, and he hasn’t been benched. Knoblauch’s approach to accountability is confusing watching from the outside, and it has to be frustrating for the players. That criticism is fair.

Knoblauch has also taken criticism for his systemic approach, which is an argument that I simply don’t understand or agree with. He started the season with the same five-on-five systems that got the Oilers to back-to-back Stanley Cup Finals, yet people were saying that the system was the reason for the team’s early season struggles. They said so without being able to explain exactly what aspects of the system are flawed. When Knoblauch said he was running the same systems, people thought it was a lie because it didn’t support their narrative. He said that tweaks were coming in late November. The team had a stretch of slightly improved play, but has fallen off again over the last month. I can’t speak to what those tweaks were, so it’s not fair for me to comment on their effectiveness.

Draisaitl’s comment about not being able to win with only four or five guys going speaks to something else Knoblauch has faced criticism for, which is his distribution of ice time. We’ve seen many ice time splits like Wednesday’s game where the fourth line of Mangiapane (7:39), Mattias Janmark (5:31), and Curtis Lazar (4:34) all saw minimal ice time. 

Early in the season, the complaint was about his heavy reliance on McDavid and Draisaitl. They played together, and they played a lot. That meant that younger players like Matt Savoie and Ike Howard didn’t get much ice time.

Lazar, Josh Samanski, Quinn Hutson, Max Jones, and Connor Clattenburg have all averaged less than ten minutes of ice time per game this season. Lazar’s inclusion on this list is annoying since his five-on-five expected goals for percentage is third among Oilers forwards that have played more than eight games. 

Professional rookies like Samanski, Hutson, and Clattenburg have barely seen the ice in their NHL games despite playing quite well in the AHL this season. Howard got more time than he did earlier in the season during his most recent callup. Savoie is the only rookie that seems to have earned Knoblauch’s trust. This isn’t an axe that I’m personally grinding as playing well in the AHL doesn’t always translate to NHL success, but many fans are frustrated by this trend. I get that it’s hard to play well enough to earn ice time when you barely touch the ice, but you also have to earn your ice time.

I wrote about Knoblauch’s reliance on McDavid and Draisaitl earlier this season. I went back to 2018-19 and noted how much five-on-five time McDavid and Draisaitl had on their own and together each season and compared it with team five-on-five goal scoring. I noticed an important pattern: the more they play, the LESS the team scores.

Related: Knoblauch’s reliance on McDavid and Draisaitl

That seems funny because those are the two best players in the world and you would think that the team would score more if they play more often, but that’s not how it works. There’s no direct correlation between their ice time and their individual offensive production. That’s the same for other players as well. Team scoring doesn’t drop when the two superstars play more often because the other players aren’t getting the opportunities they need to produce. The simple and harsh truth is that they play more when the other players aren’t good enough to warrant getting more ice time.

The three seasons where McDavid and Draisaitl have had their highest usage totals are 2018-19, last season, and this season. The Oilers missed the playoffs in 2018-19 because the roster was garbage. The quality of the roster has declined in each of the last two seasons, and McDavid and Draisaitl’s ice time has crept up in concert with the decline of the roster. That’s not a coincidence.

That’s where Draisaitl’s comment about it starting at the top could be interpreted as a shot at Bowman and his roster construction. Bowman’s 2025-26 roster needs to be viewed with the context that the league salary cap increased by $7.5 million, but the Oilers gave raises to Draisaitl and Bouchard that totalled $12.4 million. I have zero issue with those raises. That’s the cost of doing business with important core players. The reality that those raises presented this season was the team needing to shave salary by moving on from some veterans and replacing them with younger and cheaper players. This roster, especially the forward group, is significantly weaker than previous iterations.

The result was ALWAYS going to be a step backwards. That’s why I have a hard time putting the team’s results this season on the coach. I’m not buying the systems argument. I genuinely doubt that the supporting cast of forwards would be producing much more offensively if given a few more shifts each game. I think the ice time distribution is a signal of the quality of the supporting cast. 

Some might view Knoblauch’s ice time distribution as a shot at Bowman and his roster construction, which has created a narrative that there’s a rift between them and they don’t see eye to eye. I can’t confirm or deny that because I’m not around them.

My thought is that Bowman understands the realities of their cap situation better than anyone and I’m sure he understands that this is something of a transitional season from a roster perspective. He would never say anything other than he thinks this team can win it all, but he was intentional about adding youth and discount contracts this summer. I don’t see him being as arrogant as to place the blame on the coach when he understands the realities of the roster and the cap situation.

I’ve heard some suggestions that Knoblauch has coached the offence out of some players because some new veterans have seen decreases in production and some players that came and left performed better on their next teams than they did here. That trend precedes Knoblauch. It goes all the way back to the Decade of Darkness. It isn’t isolated to Knoblauch or any one coach, so I think we can drop that narrative.

I’m not suggesting that a coaching change is coming, but there are whispers. I feel that a change involving defence coach Mark Stuart is more likely than a head coaching change because he wasn’t hired by this management regime and his penalty kill is currently floundering; but I wouldn’t rule anything out at this point.

My point is that the issues are roster related. As has been the case for a team with two superstars in a flat cap world, the Oilers are a top heavy team, especially this season. The good news is that they have $12,363,334 in cap space to work with this summer that won’t be taken up by raises to core players. Those raises have all been accounted for already. That cap space is all surplus. It needs to be spent wisely, but it’s there for the Oilers to spend. The roster should be more balanced next season, and it will be even more balanced when the cap jumps again in 2027-28.

That doesn’t help them this season though. Once again, Oilers fans will hear their favourite phrase leading up to the trade deadline: “Dollar in, dollar out”. There’s no LTIR situation coming to rescue them this season. I’ll go through more trade deadline scenarios in another piece at a later date, but the Oilers don’t have much room to play with. They can’t add unless they subtract.

Improvement is going to have to come from within. The Oilers are a better team than what they have shown in the last two weeks, and I don’t think this roster has reached its peak yet; but I also doubt this roster’s peak is as high as it has been the last two seasons.

As Draisaitl said, everyone has to be better. The players have some onus to find improvement from within themselves. I don’t believe that this season is Knoblauch’s fault, but it’s his problem to fix. He and his staff have to find a way to extract more from their players as well. Bowman will have to be creative at the trade deadline. They all share the blame, and they all have parts to play in fixing it.

Having said all of that, I’m tempering my expectations for this team this season. My preseason prediction was a second round exit, and it could even be earlier than that. I’ll have to see some significant progress after the Olympic break and at the trade deadline to change my mind on that.