Building the perfect top-six around McDavid and Draisaitl |
In the past two off-seasons, the Edmonton Oilers made significant attempts at upgrading their winger depth, adding Jeff Skinner and Viktor Arvidsson during the 2024 free agency and then Andrew Mangiapane in 2025. On paper, it seemed reasonable to think that at least one of those players could have found success on Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl’s wings.
But each of those signings ultimately failed to pan out for the Oilers. Skinner left in free agency after spending much of Edmonton’s 2025 playoff run as a healthy scratch, Arvidsson was moved to Boston in a cap‑clearing trade, and Mangiapane was dealt at the 2026 Trade Deadline.
There are several plausible explanations as to why these additions failed to materialize. Both Arvidsson and Mangiapane had an injury history, and Skinner was a poor defensive player who also failed to succeed with San Jose in 2025-26, so there are player-specific factors at play here. I also believe coaching was a huge reason; as I discussed in detail in an article a few weeks back, there was a general trend of Kris Knoblauch failing to get the most out of his forwards.
At the same time, it’s interesting to note Vasily Podkolzin’s success. Prior to his arrival in Edmonton, Podkolzin certainly didn’t have much positive experience in an NHL top-six; in fact, the season before he was traded, Podkolzin spent most of the year in the AHL. And yet, he wound up being substantially more useful to Edmonton than any of Skinner, Arvidsson and Mangiapane.
I believe there is another variable at play here, one that is often heavily underrated and undermentioned in much of public hockey discourse: chemistry.
In this article, I would like to dive deeper into the various lines that McDavid and Draisaitl have played on over the past few years, identify the common traits among the wingers who have succeeded, and outline what this should mean for Edmonton moving forward, both in terms of deployment by Edmonton’s next head coach – whoever it may be – and roster construction by management.
*All statistics via Natural Stat Trick, EvolvingHockey and AllThreeZones
What types of players succeed on Leon Draisaitl’s wing?
We’ll start with an analysis of Draisaitl’s wingers. I compiled every line that has logged at least 50 minutes at 5‑on‑5 over the past seven seasons with Draisaitl on it. Lines involving McDavid were removed as we’re specifically looking at Draisaitl’s second-line performance.
Then, I ranked those lines by goal share, which is the percent of on-ice goals that a line has controlled (e.g. if a line is on-ice for 3 goals for and 2 goals against, they have a 60 percent goal share, as they have controlled 3 of the 5 (60 percent) total goals on-ice). I also included expected goal share to identify whether results were driven by sustainable play or short‑term puck luck, which can be common in small sample sizes. Here are the results:
Before interpreting these results, it is important to note that some of these samples are rather small, and are thus prone to variance or noise. The goal of this exercise is not to produce a definitive ranking of every combination, but to identify a general trend in which wingers consistently helped Draisaitl drive play.
First, we can see a clear common denominator in three of the top-five lines here: Vasily Podkolzin.
Podkolzin has been Draisaitl’s most frequent 5‑on‑5 winger over the past two seasons, and the results justify that usage. As a duo, they have posted a 58 percent goal share and a 55 percent expected goal share. Without Podkolzin, Draisaitl’s numbers fall to 50 and 47 percent respectively. It seems incredibly clear that there is legitimately strong chemistry between Draisaitl........