Vancouver CanucksEvan Bouchard opened the season with a hat trick and five points, which is a career night for a forward and a historically strange one for a defenceman. Edmonton lost 6-5 in overtime to Vancouver, having led by three goals.
It was Mike Babcock's first game in charge and the temptation is to file it under new coach, early days, one night. The longer view is less forgiving, because the shape of that game is the shape of the last four seasons, and Bouchard's part in it is the clearest illustration of why scoring your way out has stopped working.
The best offensive defenceman in hockey
The production is not in question. Bouchard played all 82 games last season, scored 21 goals, added 74 assists and finished on 95 points. No defenceman in the league had more: Zach Werenski was next on 81, then Cale Makar on 79 and Lane Hutson on 78.
He is third in scoring on his own team behind Connor McDavid, who had 138, and Leon Draisaitl, who had 97 in 65 games. A club with those three and a 95-point defenceman should not be getting worse.
It is getting worse.
Four years of the same decline
Sixteen points gone across four seasons, with McDavid in his prime for all of it, and the 2025-26 standings show where that left them. The scoring has not been the issue at any point: Edmonton was first in the league in goals for in 2022-23, fourth the next year, and seventh last season with 282.
The other end tells the story.
| Season | Goals-for rank | Goals-against rank | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022-23 | 1st | 17th | 109 |
| 2023-24 | 4th | 10th | 104 |
| 2024-25 | 11th | 14th | 101 |
| 2025-26 | 7th | 25th | 93 |
Edmonton finished in the top seven for scoring in three of those four seasons, per Pucky's team season records. Last season the Oilers conceded 265, their worst figure of the four, while scoring 282, their second best.
Twenty-fifth in goals against. That is the whole thing. A team that scores at a top-seven rate and defends at a bottom-eight rate finishes where Edmonton finished, and no amount of offence from the blue line changes the arithmetic.
The special teams say it in one line
If you wanted a single pair of numbers for what Edmonton has become, it is this. Last season the Oilers had the best power play in the NHL at 30.6 percent. Their penalty kill was 20th, at 77.8 percent.
Thirty-three of Bouchard's 95 points came on that power play, which is both a compliment to him and a description of where the club's resources have gone.
A team can be built that way on purpose, and for a while Edmonton was: outscore the problem, win the special-teams battle on volume, let McDavid decide games. It produced 109 points in 2022-23. It has produced fewer every season since, because a 20th-ranked penalty kill and a 25th-ranked defence hand back what the power play earns, and they do it in exactly the games that are close.
Why Bouchard is the emblem rather than the cure
The 6-5 loss is a perfect miniature. Bouchard produced five points, which is as much as a defenceman can realistically contribute to winning a hockey game, and the team lost it anyway after being three goals up.
This is the trap for a club built the way Edmonton is built. Bouchard's value is overwhelmingly in creating offence, and offence is the one thing the Oilers already have in surplus. Adding more of it has diminishing returns when the deficit is at the other end of the rink, and the minutes he plays, 24.7 a night, are minutes in which the opposition is also on the ice.
Worth noting as a counterweight: Bouchard finished plus-25, which is a good figure and better than most of the defencemen above him in the usage charts. He is not a liability. But the best defensive figure on the roster belonged to Mattias Ekholm at plus-32, with six goals and 41 points, and it is the Ekholm profile rather than the Bouchard one that Edmonton has been short of.
The goaltending compounds it. Frederik Andersen, signed to help, is out with a knee injury until something like December, which leaves the crease to Tristan Jarry in the months when the Oilers historically bank their points.
The case for Edmonton, stated fairly
Where this lands
They still employ the best player in the world, a 97-point centre who missed 17 games, and the highest-scoring defenceman in hockey, and they were seventh in the league in goals for even with Draisaitl missing 17 games. Ninety-three points is a bad year for this group rather than a bad team: it is still comfortably a playoff pace in most seasons. A new coach with a defensive reputation is a direct response to the actual problem, and goaltending is the most volatile input in the sport, which cuts both ways. One overtime loss in which your defenceman scores three goals is not evidence of anything.
The points have fallen in each of the last four seasons, 109 to 104 to 101 to 93, which is a trend rather than a run of luck. The goals-against rank has moved the wrong way to 25th while the scoring stayed top-seven, so the imbalance is getting worse, not better. The club's answer to a defensive problem has been to keep accumulating offence, and Bouchard's 95 points are the proof that it does not work. Andersen is out until roughly December and the window is defined by two contracts that expire in 2028.
What it means
Watch the goals against, and watch it early, which Pucky's standings carry next to the record. Edmonton conceded 265 last season and ranked 25th; if Babcock is going to justify the hire, that number has to move before the schedule gets heavy, and the opener's six goals against Vancouver is not the start he wanted.
Watch Bouchard's production too, but interpret it correctly. If he is on pace for another 90-point season and Edmonton is still giving up three and a half goals a night in December, then the thing people will be writing about him, that he is the most productive defenceman in the league, will be true and almost beside the point. The Oilers have spent four seasons proving that you cannot outscore a bottom-eight defence with McDavid, Draisaitl and a 95-point blueliner. There is not much left to test.