Where would the Bruins, Oilers be without their top duos?

The Edmonton Oilers and Boston Bruins have four of the NHL’s top five point scorers this season. Where would they be in the standings if we took their most important players away from them?

The Boston Bruins and Edmonton Oilers are a pair of lucky hockey teams. The two teams are at — or near — the top of their respective conferences, and each have a duo of hockey players that are lighting the league on fire. For the Oilers, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are the team’s top scorers, while the Bruins have David Pastrnak and Brad Marchand.

A few weeks back, we took a look at just how mind-boggling the contributions McDavid and Draisaitl had made to the Oilers this season have been. In that piece, we wondered where the Oilers would be if McDavid and Draisaitl were to disappear from the team entirely. Would the Oilers be able to survive losing their two best players? Or would they be competing with the Detroit Red Wings and New Jersey Devils for last place in the NHL?

Instead of wondering, we decided to take a look ourselves at where the Oilers and Bruins would be this year if they weren’t getting crucial contributions offensively from their top stars. Imagine — if you will — that Pastrnak, Marchand, McDavid and Draisaitl were all Thanos’ snapped before the start of the 2019-20 NHL season and their current contributions to their respective teams were wiped away. Where would the Oilers and Bruins be after the first two months of the season without their best players?

Edmonton Oilers

Without McDavid and Draisaitl, the Oilers would no doubt lack an identity as a hockey team, to put it lightly. Edmonton runs on the two-headed-monster that is McDavid and Draisaitl, and taking them out of the Oilers’ equation would be disastrous for the team.

How devastating would it be? By the numbers, the pair make up nearly half of the Oilers’ points through the first two months of the season. Combined, McDavid and Draisaitl have 109 points in the 2019-20 NHL season, with the Oilers’ overall having 272 total across 27 players as of Wednesday, Dec. 11.

All told, the pairing of McDavid and Draisaitl has factored in to 40 percent of the Oilers’ overall offensive production this season, a sky-high statistic considering they each play an average of 22 minutes a night for Edmonton. In fact, the duo has been on the ice for nearly 72 percent of the goals scored by the Oilers this season, a comical number in the grand scheme of hockey.

Hockey, by nature, is not a sport like basketball where a team can be carried consistently by one or two players. Unlike basketball, hockey stars see just over a third of the 60 minutes of regulation time in a game, whereas basketball stars are often clocking in through all four quarters of action. To have so much offense tied up in only two hockey players — two very good ones, mind you — is staggering in today’s NHL.

As for how the Oilers would fair without McDavid and Draisaitl in this scenario, the pair are two of the top forwards this season in their goals above replacement metric, according to Evolving Hockey. The stat works similarly to how it does in baseball, where it measures how many goals a player adds to their team above an average replacement-level player. McDavid, after 33 games played, has a GAR of 9.6, while Draisaitl has a GAR of 5.7 through the first nine weeks of the season.

Though GAR isn’t a catch-all statistic of determining a player’s worth, it’s fair to say that goals-wise, the Oilers would be missing a lot of firepower without McDavid and Draisaitl in the lineup. Going through each of the Oilers’ 18 wins this season and stripping away any goals that had McDavid or Draisaitl attached to it would leave the Oilers outright losing 11 games — and tying on six of them — due to the pair’s contributions in those key games.

Overall, the Oilers would have just one win if the duo’s contributions were taken away, with their 4-0 shutout victory over the Devils on Nov. 8 becoming a 2-0 victory after Draisaitl’s goal and McDavid’s assist were scrubbed from the record.

Of course, this method is not scientific in the least, as if McDavid and Draisaitl were lost in an unspeakable catastrophe before the 2019-20 season began, the Oilers would have filled their spots in the lineup with players that likely would have given the team more than one win overall in their first 33 games of the season. Still, to see just how much the Oilers’ offense has relied upon the duo that Edmonton would have managed one win had McDavid and Draisaitl had not put up points at all during those games is a testament to their talent as players.

Boston Bruins

If the Bruins lost Pastrnak and Marchand, Boston would be at a loss for some top quality scoring, but overall would not suffer as greatly as Edmonton would in this scenario.

This season, as of Dec. 11, the Bruins have 285 total points overall from the players on their roster. Marchand and Pastrnak have accounted for 91 of the Bruins total points this year, making them responsible for 32 percent of the points Boston has scored two months into the season.

Overall, it’s already clear to see that the duo of Marchand and Pastrnak has been less essential to the Bruins’ spot in the NHL standings than McDavid and Draisaitl have. Both Pastrnak and Marchand are tremendous hockey players, there’s no denying that, but overall the Bruins have a more balanced offensive than their Edmonton counterparts.

If it felt like stating the obvious that the Bruins overall would be less impacted by the loss of their two biggest stars, the numbers under the surface only strengthen that point. This season, Pastrnak and Marchand have played an average of about 19 minutes each per game while the Bruins overall have a solid spread of minutes played for their forward corps. The duo of Marchand and Pastrnak leads Bruins forwards, of course, but the pair are relied upon much less than that of McDavid and Draisaitl.

The underlying numbers also suggest that Pastrnak and Marchand are carrying less of the overall load in Boston. Among forwards, Marchand’s GAR is first in the NHL at 13.2, according to Evolving Hockey, a full point above Colorado’s Nathan MacKinnon. Pastrnak’s 7.2 GAR does crack the top 25 forwards this season, but had been below the top 30 mark earlier in the season.

Those numbers are still high compared to many of the NHL’s top stars, but it suggests that the Bruins have more than just two top goal scorers on their team. Patrice Bergeron, Pastrnak and Marchand’s linemate, actually slides in at 13th overall with a 8.7 GAR this season even though he has just 25 points this season.

Grading the Bruins by the same very scientific, 100 percent accurate method of taking away goals that had Marchand or Pastrnak attached to it and seeing where the team ends up, Boston overall does not suffer as poorly as the Oilers did. The Bruins actually come out break even in terms of straight wins and losses, as Boston would still win seven of their 20 victories outright this year without Pastrnak or Marchand while suffering seven outright losses. Six of those wins would turn into ties, with no real way of predicting a win or a loss in the overtime or a shootout.

Part of that is due to Boston’s more consistent offense, but it is also due to the Bruins’ goaltending of Tuukka Rask and Jaroslav Halak. The pair have shut out opponents four times this season and overall have performed incredibly well in net for the Bruins, increasing their margin of victory in the games that mattered for this hypothetical scenario.

And again, this scenario is totally nonsensical and unlikely to occur, as Boston would fill the roles of Marchand and Pastrnak with players that likely would be making significant impacts in the lineup. Still, the effects of Pastrnak and Marchand on the Bruins’ lineup is worth a look at the end of the day.

So, who has it worse?

It’s quite clear that the Oilers would be much worse off if they had lost McDavid and Draisaitl in a sudden incident before the beginning of the season. The pair are accounting for so much of the team’s offense, that taking them out of the Edmonton lineup would cause the team to be one of the worst in the league without much of an offense to stand upon.

The Bruins, on the other hand, would fare better than their counterparts without Pastrnak and Marchand, but would no doubt drop in the standings as well. Boston has more going for them offensively this season, and overall have a better goaltending tandem that would allow them to win more games without their two best players.

Thankfully, neither Boston nor Edmonton will have to think of a world where they have lost their best hockey players for good. If they did, though, the entire hockey landscape — not just Boston and Edmonton — would be vastly changed.