There's not really a huge difference in offense from this year to last year at this same point. 35 goals versus 31 goals both season's with ridiculously low shooting percentages to start the year. They're just very uptight to start both years.
There actually is quite a huge difference... people don't seem to see the inevitable drop in offense and seem to think everyone else can just pick up the slack... but we see that isn't happening.
McDavid scored 32... now this one is temporary obviously but he's out so that's a big loss in the short term.
Kane scored 24... he's out long term.
Hyman was expected to revert back to being a ~30 goal scorer and there was no way he was going to repeat the 54 he put up so that's ~24 goals gone.
Foegele scored 20... he's gone.
McLeod scored 12... he's gone.
Ceci 5... he's gone.
Desharnais/Gagner/Holloway/Carrick/Erne.. they combined for 15 goals. They are all gone.
That's a total of 132 goals out of the lineup right now... and sure there's players who are in the lineup who should be able to replace some of that.. but really the team was depending on Skinner and Arvidsson to have huge seasons for the team. These are players that scored 24 and 6 goals respectively last season and I'm sure most were expecting them to easily score 25+ each... maybe even 30+ each BUT chemistry being what it is... it isn't always easy to just plug and play pieces into a lineup and it takes time and patience for players and lines to gel... and sometimes it simply never does happen like people expect. Pozkolzin looks like a decent player as well overall but he's certainly offensively challenged as well in terms of goal scoring... was last season in Vancouver and that continues on the Oilers.
Henrique is a unique situation as well... I could see he was likely doomed in the bottom 6 playing with players like Brown/Janmark and his offensive abilities are likely being snuffed by the stone handed bottom 6 linemates he has... not that Henrique gets absolved of all blame of course... but I'm sure many were looking at him to add 20-25 goals as well to help make up the offensive deficits.
I just couldn't see where all the offense was going to come from and figured this would be a regression year for the team offensively and it's basically playing out exactly like that so far. Bad luck or just not the horses in the lineup and just not the overall team chemistry so far to score like they did last year? Probably both factors are true.