One of my favourite yearly hockey traditions is reading The Athletic’s NHL Player Tiers. Apart from offering a good overview of the league’s landscape heading into the season, it’s also the best opportunity to learn what decision-makers across the league think about the league’s best players.
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With this year’s tiers dropping on Tuesday, today we will look at how The Athletic’s experts and their sources inside the league ranked the Edmonton Oilers’ stars.
Seven Oilers made the top 150: Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard, Zach Hyman, Mattias Ekholm, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, and Stuart Skinner. No real surprises there, they’re the team’s seven best players.
Seven players in the top 150 tied with Dallas, Florida, New Jersey, Nashville, and Tampa Bay for second in the league, behind only the New York Rangers’ eight. Of course, the players at the top are much more important. To that end, McDavid and Draisaitl both ranked in the MVP tier, with McDavid at the very top as expected. Only Florida (Barkov and Tkachuk) and Colorado (MacKinnon and Makar) also had two players in that top tier.
NHL Player Tiers 📕📙📗📘
The top 150 players in hockey, separated into five distinct tiers.
A ranking that combines the collective wisdom of hockey insiders (GMs, coaches, analysts, scouts) and each player’s projected value for the 2024-25 season. pic.twitter.com/NAJI8takVJ— dom 📈 (@domluszczyszyn) September 24, 2024
McDavid ranking as the best player in the league is no surprise. Neither is Draisaitl placing in the top ten — alongside Aleksander Barkov, Nikita Kucherov, and Cale Makar in tier 1B.
The next Oiler on the list isn’t surprising, but his placement is. Everyone in Edmonton knows how good Evan Bouchard is. However, it’s still a little dizzying to see an Oilers defenceman ranked as a franchise player just outside the top five at his position — sharing a tier with Charlie McAvoy and above Rasmus Dahlin and Victor Hedman.
Considering Roman Josi is entering his age-34 season, there’s a good chance Bouchard gets leaguewide recognition as a top-five defenceman this season.
Bouchard’s partner, Mattias Ekholm, got plenty of love, too. He sits among the top twenty defenders in the league, sharing a tier with Western Conference rivals Drew Doughty, Shea Theodore, Devon Toews, and MacKenzie Weegar.
Zach Hyman also got a huge boost coming off his 54-goal campaign. After squeaking onto the 100-player list before last season, Hyman now ranks as a top-ten right winger in the league. He sits in tier 3B, just above Ekholm and beside Devils star Jesper Bratt.
Finally, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Stuart Skinner are in tier five as support pieces. Falling from 104 points to 67 obviously led to a slide down the rankings for Nuge. However, he still sits next to two 50-goal scorers Steven Stamkos and Chris Kreider, and above fellow left-wingers Alex DeBrincat, Jonathan Marchessault, and Alex Ovechkin.
Skinner makes the cut as the last goalie on the list, just behind his opposite number in the Stanley Cup Final, Sergei Bobrovsky. That makes him the 12th-ranked goalie in the league and the only Canadian netminder on the list. If that’s how The Athletic’s league sources see Skinner, don’t be surprised if he’s team Canada’s starter at the Four Nations Face-Off in February.
This is all just another way of reinforcing what we already know: that the Edmonton Oilers are one of the very best teams in the league. Their competition is all over this list, as they placed the same amount of players as the reigning Stanley Cup champs, this year’s Central Division favourites, and a recent back-to-back Cup winner.
That’s who they’ll have to beat to reach their goal this season, but as we’ve seen, they certainly have the firepower to do it.
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