Might German sniper Dominik Kahun fill a major hole for Edmonton Oilers? We’re about to find out

Top 60 is a first-line scoring rate over those two seasons, indeed in 2019-20 alone his 2.43 P/60 ranked 36th among the 371 NHL forwards who played 400+ minutes at 5v5. That from 10-17-27 in just over 11 hours of 5v5 play.

Hardly feature minutes, either: in Pittsburgh his most frequent linemate was Jared McCann, with whom Kahun scored 6-8-14 in 300 minutes; in Buffalo after the deadline, it was Marcus Johansson, (2-2-4 in 60 minutes). Those are solid NHL players, but they aren’t exactly Sidney Crosby and Jack Eichel.

Whether the latest signee can produce playing with and against top NHLers remains an open question, but I have a feeling Oilers fans are soon to find out. It seems virtually certain Kahun will get a test drive with Draisaitl, potentially freeing up Ryan Nugent-Hopkins to ride shotgun with Connor McDavid. Would that solve a few problems or what?

By several reports the Oilers expressed early interest in Kahun but the two sides couldn’t agree on terms. Now they have, at a shade under a million bucks on a one-year pact that will leave the Oilers with RFA rights at its expiry. From this distance Ken Holland won the waiting game, and in the process landed a potentially useful player.

In a previous post about depth scoring, we noted the 2019-20 Oilers had “two first lines, two fourth lines”. In fact there were exactly five forwards who scored at first-line rates, and a bunch of depth players who scored like fourth-liners. Nothing in between. At the time of writing Ken Holland had just added UFAs Tyler Ennis and Kyle Turris, theoretically flanked by Jesse Puljujarvi who had no NHL numbers in 2019-20 but in the Finnish Liiga produced the equivalent of a creditable 35 points per 82 games. That potentially solved the third line, but still left a hole on the top six.