Oilers and Avs should be electric

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Everything seems to be breaking favourably for the National Hockey League this postseason. It won’t be hard to find a marketing headline for this year’s Western Conference Final. Best player in the world versus best team in the world? Yes, sign us all up.

The Edmonton Oilers – having worked through the first two rounds of the playoffs – are facing a new challenge in the form of the Colorado Avalanche.

The Avs may have the deepest depth chart in the league, but they also have an impressive collection of superstars at the top of the lineup. It’s what differentiates them from the two teams the Oilers have dispatched so far this postseason. Connor McDavid’s line going nuclear against the top six of Los Angeles and Calgary wasn’t surprising. Against Colorado? It’s undeniably a bigger challenge.

The Avalanche won’t be mistaken for a lockdown defensive team, but that sort of defensive strategy – which was, to some degree, deployed by the Kings in Round 1 – has rarely worked against a player of McDavid’s skill set anyway. Rather, the Avalanche prefer to skate teams into the ground, with Nathan MacKinnon’s blazing speed and Cale Makar’s puck-moving wizardry coalescing to create an offensive juggernaut.

To put this in perspective, consider the scoring rates for the Oilers with McDavid and top defenceman Darnell Nurse on the ice over the past three seasons versus that of their Colorado foes. It’s true that the Oilers have seen some defensive weakness with their top group (McDavid line + Nurse pairing) on the ice over the years, but they are still comfortably ahead of their opponents (+0.7 goals per 60 minutes at even strength).

Now compare that to what Colorado has observed with MacKinnon and Makar deployed:

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