Vrana is more valuable than Drai who is quite possibly the worst defensive forward in the NHL

Just have the NHL schedule them to play my Blackhawksdown all 82 games. He would get those additional 302 tallies by the end of 2021-22 season for sure!

lmao

is that actually true? This was just far more blunt than I expected and its hysterical

Can't be worse than Kuzy.

It's pretty close tbh

It's close, there's some competition, Kakko, Galch, as the guy below this mentioned, Kuzy, but he's definitely up (down?) there

He’s overplayed, if he actually played sufficient minutes for a forward he’d have pretty good defensive metrics like he had in 16-17.

How much of that was McD tho, ik he also had a career year (so far) defensively that year (coincidentally the year they made playoffs)... I'm assuming they played mostly together that year as well, and I'd trust the two most recent years of terrible defensive play rather than the one year of good defensive play and assume that that's a thing he can do if the oilers ever figure out how to put a team together

Obviously Mcdavid would have a big impact on Draisaitl’s play but Draisaitl also has played 3/4’s this season and almost all of last season with Mcdavid. However, Draisaitl deserves a lot of credit for what he did in 16-17 and even 17-18. The overall drop off in defensive statistics could only be linked to him being over used, and it is fairly obvious if you watched Oilers games consistently. Since Chiarelli decided to sacrifice our wingers for the corpse of Sam Gagner, the dude who broke Mcdavids collarbone, Griffin Reinhart and Adam ‘1 for’ Larsson. Tippett is forced to over work both Mcdavid and Draisaitl (mostly Draisaitl right now because Mcdavid wingers suck) and his stats as a result take a hit.