October 26, 2025 by Ryan Lotsberg

A piece like this is becoming an annual tradition for me. Fans of the Edmonton Oilers are angry at a lot of things early in the 2025-26 season, most of which have to do with how Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch is deploying his forward lines. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are being heavily relied upon, and they have spent a lot of time playing together. The team as a whole isn’t scoring many goals or generating many scoring chances, and their record is better than it should be. Most fans think that splitting the superstars up is best for the team.

In the past, Knoblauch has argued that playing McDavid and Draisaitl together gives the other players on the roster more of an opportunity to play and to get into the game, and splitting them up takes some players out of the game because two lines get a lot of ice time while two lines barely touch the ice.

Let’s assume that an average game sees each team get three powerplays (which is the approximate league average per game). That means twelve of the sixty minutes of a hockey game are played at five-on-four. This isn’t a perfect analogy because of other game types, but let’s not overthink this. For this analogy, let’s assume we have 48 minutes of five-on-five hockey to distribute between four lines.

This season, McDavid is averaging 16:52 of five-on-five ice time, and Draisaitl is getting 15:59. If they play together, we can safely subtract seventeen minutes from the 48 available five-on-five minutes, which leaves us with 31 minutes to distribute to the other lines or nine players. If they play apart, then two lines take up 33 minutes, leaving fifteen minutes for the other two lines. That simple logic checks out.

However, life isn’t simple. Neither is ice time distribution on an NHL hockey team. It isn’t community novice hockey where everyone gets an equal shift and each line gets the same ice time. Nope, this is the best league in the world where winning is the only real priority.

McDavid and Draisaitl are the two best players on the planet. Their linemates do not get the same amount of ice time that they do. They never have, and they never will. If McDavid and Zach Hyman both were in the lineup last year, they played together. McDavid averaged 17:12 of five-on-five ice time last season while Hyman averaged 14:47. 

McDavid and Draisaitl get extra shifts with various wingers throughout the course of a given game. Sometimes it’s as simple as getting one of them out with the fourth line to take advantage of another team’s fourth line, and sometimes it’s a totally random line featuring a superstar and a couple of players that merit more ice time based on experience or having a good game that night. When that happens, it throws the other three lines off for a shift apiece, so some new combinations go over the boards. Some line mixing happens as a result of that alone.

Knoblauch has had the lines in a blender all season long though. What he is doing is different than what I described above. Line combinations aren’t lasting for more than a couple of periods at a time right now. No combination is truly working, and the coach isn’t giving anything time to gel.

McDavid and Draisaitl playing together is thought of as a crutch by Oilers fans. It’s lazy thinking to just stick the best two players in the world together. Most fans believe that the Oilers are at their best when McDavid and Draisaitl are running their own lines. 

I don’t necessarily believe that. I’ve been writing about this debate for a few years now because it comes up in Oilers fan discourse every single year. My research on the effectiveness of McDavid and Draisaitl playing together or playing apart has suggested that the results are entirely dependent on the time. Some years it has proven to be better to keep them together, and other years it has been better to split them apart. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter one iota whether they’re together or not. I don’t think one way is the best course of action over the other. It genuinely doesn’t bother me that Oilers coaches put them together in the third period if they’re trailing. That just seems like the right thing to do. It doesn’t bother me when coaches put them together if the team isn’t playing well. Why? Because one way isn’t overtly better than the other in this situation.

Having said that, I do believe that it’s worth evaluating recent data sets to determine what’s working and what’s not working to inform the next decision. To that end, I’ve compiled some numbers based on this season so far. The analysis includes five-on-five goals for percentage (GF%), expected goals for percentage (xGF%), and Corsi for percentage (CF%) for McDavid and Draisaitl together and for each of them on their own.

That’s only half of the equation though. If you’re going to remove one scoring line by putting the superstars together, then you need to have a capable second scoring line as well. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is and always has been the second line centre when McDavid and Draisaitl play together. I have included the same metrics for Nugent-Hopkins away from McDavid and Draisaitl. The data as derived from Natural Stat Trick:

2025-26	GF%	xGF%	CF%
97 & 29 Together (94:16)	75 (3-1)	66.17	59.35
97 w/o 29 (57:31)	33.33 (3-6)	56.49	48.57
29 w/o 97 (49:40)	66.67 (2-1)	47.89	46.02
93 w/o 97 or 29 (79:13)	0 (0-2)	56.8	47.68

The numbers say that McDavid and Draisaitl have been brilliant together this season, but they are playing low-event hockey. They’ve been on the ice for four total goals in 94:16. McDavid has been on the ice for nine total goals in just 57:31 without Draisaitl. The superstars haven’t been filling the net at the pace their expected goals and puck possession numbers suggest they should be. That doesn’t mean they should be split up though.

Neither superstar is performing anywhere close to the level they are together while apart this season. McDavid’s goal share away from Draisaitl is concerning, and his xGF% is much lower away from Draisaitl this season. For those that think that seems like an obvious result, there have been three seasons in which McDavid’s xGF% has been higher away from Draisaitl than it has been with him since 2018-19. Draisaitl’s xGF% being below 50% away from McDavid isn’t enough to make me think that the 66.67% GF% away from McDavid will continue. Nothing about these numbers says that they should be split up right now.

Related: The Nuclear Option – Part One

Nugent-Hopkins’s xGF% of 56.8% away from McDavid and Draisaitl is encouraging. That along with how well the superstars have played together despite the actual goals not flowing tells me that McDavid and Draisaitl should be playing together right now.

I wish there were some consistent lines that were working right now like the rest of Oil Country, but I also feel that the reason that nothing has stuck is because the players haven’t played well enough. Seven of the forwards that played in Seattle on Saturday night were not Oilers in June. Two of those seven had no NHL experience prior to this season, and two of them had minimal NHL experience. It hasn’t helped that players are getting added during the season (Roslovic) and that other players are getting hurt (Kapanen). It will take some time and some tinkering to find combinations that work, and that will likely continue after Zach Hyman returns as well.

As far as the concern about constant reliance on McDavid and Draisaitl is concerned, I have things to say about that as well. I have a whole other piece on how their usage compares to how other teams use their star players. They’re playing more together this season than they ever have, but this is also a small sample size. There will be stretches this season where they play apart as there have been in every other season in this era of Oilers hockey.

I’ll also have another piece coming soon about Knoblauch’s usage of his rookies and young/inexperienced players, which is another common and consistent gripe among Oilers fans, so stay tuned for that.