It's... not about... now though
It's... about this team's 82 game prorated goalscoring every season since Gaudreau entered the NHL.
2014-15 - 237 - and this was the year Giordano missed the latter quarter of the season
2015-16 - 229
2016-17 - 222
2017-18 - 216 - and this was that absolutely miserable Gulutzan year where the team was two places shy of
DFL in shooting percentage
2018-19 - 289
2019-20 - 239
2020-21 - 227
2020-21 (Ward) - 222
2020-21 (Sutter) - 232
Your prediction, was that this team, which has bottomed out at 216 goals, was going to score fewer than 200 goals.
Now let's stop for a second.
"But we won't have Giordano!?"
Okay, so I'm going to establish one pretty basic statement - that secondary assists for defensemen are a pretty noisy statisitic (since there is no existence of a tertiary or quaternary assist, it requires a very specific circumstance to isolate value from a Dman's second assist)
And I'm going to follow that up with another statement: "The offensive skill defenseman on the 4F 1D powerplay is not of high impact compared to the offensive skill of the four forwards"
Based on these two statements, or if you insist, assumptions, let's look at the primary points totals of our defensemen last year (100+ minutes played 5v5):
It's pretty evident that Hanifin, Giordano, Andersson, and Valimaki, all in similar icetimes, were similar producers. Giordano wasn't this elite play creator last year. He was a solid #3, #4 defenseman for us. While his absence may have created a bit of an offensive hole, it was fair to assume that, even
if Oliver Kylington didn't come and light the world on fire, Juuso Valimaki would have gotten some opportunity as Chris Tanev's partner, and probably produced at a rate offensively similar to Mark Giordano.
So really, where were you assuming this vacuum of goals to come from?
Surely not the 1st powerplay unit, which retained the four forwards (Gaudreau, Tkachuk, Lindholm, Monahan) who have been a PP staple since 2018-19.
The bottom six? Last year's team had friggin Joakim Nordstrom on it. And while I'm a bit surprised at how productive our 4th line has been so far given the absense of Derek Ryan... it's also important to consider that the production of the 4th line is not a large portion of any team's season-end goal total. You can roughly apply that sensibility to the second powerplay unit as well. Does Edmonton even have one of those?
The second line? Backlund and Mangiapane have produced almost every single year at ES. You didn't even need to predict Mangiapane's wild season. Backlund's on-ice 5v5 goal pace last year was 50 goals. Playing a big chunk of it with the aformentioned Nordstrom.
The first line? Last season, Gaudreau-Lindholm-Tkachuk spent 165:07 together and scored 13 5v5 goals together. If you figure they'll spend about 15 minutes a game 5v5, that's over a goal per game just from your top line at 5v5. 82 goals.
So we already have 132 goals expected
just from the top two lines 5v5. Without factoring in depth scoring, shorthanded goals, 3v3 goals, powerplay goals, etc etc. You really think all that couldn't amount to 68 goals?
Really?