December 13, 2023 by Ryan Lotsberg

The fortunes of the Edmonton Oilers have certainly changed. They fired Jay Woodcroft and Dave Manson after a 3-9-1 start. A month later, the team beat the Chicago Blackhawks to put their record over .500 for the first time all season. They have won eight straight games. The Oilers are 13-12-1 now, which means that they are 10-3 since new head coach Kris Knoblauch and new assistant coach Paul Coffey arrived.

Related: Oilers Fire Woodcroft and Manson & Name Knoblauch and Coffey as replacements

I’ll be fair to Woodcroft and Manson. There were a lot of underlying numbers that suggested positive regression was inevitable for the Oilers based on the way they were playing in the early part of the season. It’s not their fault that Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Ryan McLeod, Mattias Ekholm, and Brett Kulak were all playing through various injuries and ailments. It’s not their fault that the goaltending was awful in those early games. However, I also need to be fair to Knoblauch because he has made some changes that have positively impacted the team’s results.

First, he has abandoned Woodcroft’s 1-1-3 neutral zone system and gone to the 1-2-2 system that the Oilers used last season. The 1-1-3 system has one forward pressuring the puck in the offensive zone and forcing the puck to one side of the ice. The middle forward needs to read the play and challenge the puck in the neutral zone. The three players at the defensive blue line are there to force a dump-in and to raise the odds of retrieving the puck after the dump-in happens.

My observation was that it was far too easy for teams to go through the neutral zone with speed. The two forwards being stuck in the middle of the ice offered no real resistance. That forced the players defending the blue line to back off for fear of being beaten wide. The other issue that created was a large gap high in the offensive zone in which offensive players trailing the play and joining the rush late could walk into a prime scoring area with speed, time, and space.

The 1-2-2 system still has one forward pressuring the puck in the offensive zone and forcing the puck one direction, but the other two forwards are in position to challenge the puck in the neutral zone. That added traffic in the neutral zone adds resistance and makes it more difficult for the opposition to enter the offensive zone with control.

The other tactical change that Knoblauch has made is a change to the type of zone defence that the team plays. Woodcroft was using a box plus one zone defence. Four players would form a box, and one player would pursue the puck aggressively. The player pressuring the puck would change depending on where the puck was in the zone. The idea was to create traps where a player would skate the puck into two players resulting in turnovers.

I’ll be clear in saying that this defensive zone system wasn’t the reason that the Oilers started so poorly this season. Having said that, the issues that I saw with this system were that there was often confusion as to who should be pressuring the puck. The system called for a lot of switches, and those switches led to confusion.

Related: Oilers Glaring Individual Mistakes

Another issue I saw was that the spacing of the players in the box was too wide. The reason for that was so that players would be closer to the boards to create those traps with the player pressuring the puck. However, we saw many examples of dangerous scoring areas being left open as a result of that wide spacing.

Knoblauch has gone away from the box plus one system. He is still using a zone defence, but he doesn’t have one player aggressively pressuring the puck. He has made slot coverage a priority by tightening the spacing of the box formation and by putting the centre in the middle of the box.

Check out this video from Ryan Rishaug during a practice in their recent six day break:

Interesting drill, box spray painted onto the ice, players outside the middle have to stay in their quadrant.

3rd straight day of practice, might as well get creative. pic.twitter.com/VA8aNHewXS

— Ryan Rishaug (@TSNRyanRishaug) December 5, 2023

You can see the box spray painted onto the ice. That has in essence shrunk the area that the Oilers are trying to cover. The result has been far fewer defensive breakdowns, fewer shots against, and the goaltenders having a much easier time due to the team allowing lower quality shots against. I won’t credit this as the only reason for Stuart Skinner’s turnaround, but it has certainly made his life a lot easier.

Related: Oilers Penalty Killing Revival

Finally, Knoblauch put the trio of McDavid, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and Zach Hyman together. Simply put, they’ve been dominant. The trio was formed during the team’s 6-3 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on November 22, 2023. They teamed up for the team’s third goal of the game. Knoblauch kept them together for the next game against the Washington Capitals, which was the first game in the current eight-game winning streak. They’ve outscored the opposition 12-2 at five-on-five this season.

I understand that there were a lot of people that were upset that Woodcroft and Manson were fired. Both are good coaches and good people, and there were a lot of factors at play in the Oilers’ terrible start. A lot of people thought that Knoblauch would falsely get credit when the team inevitably started regressing towards the mean. Let’s give Knoblauch some credit here though. The changes he has made have been impactful. The new systems that Woodcroft implemented this season didn’t work well for this group. Coffey’s messaging to the defencemen about making plays has been effective. Positive regression is a factor in the Oilers’ recent success, but so is the new coaching staff.

The Oilers will try for a club record tying ninth consecutive win when they host the Tampa Bay Lightning on Thursday night.