The one thing that's funny enough about the critiques of Edmonton's defensive game is that they outperformed Nashville in every defensive category in the regular season.
Again. It's not just about "categories of performance". It's about how different teams strengths/weaknesses and structure + systems match up overall. How those things interact creates the uniqueness of an actual matchup on the ice.
That's where you get nuance. Like the Canucks offense tended to perform a lot better against other strong but aggressive offensive teams. Teams that just locked things down and offered nothing, Canucks generally struggled against more. But that's not what they're heading into with the Oilers now.
The Oilers allowed fewer shots, shot attempts, scoring chances, and high danger scoring chances than Nashville at even strength this season, and allowed the same number of goals against.
And the way Nashville played in the playoffs was very different from what they did through most of the regular season. They clamped things down tight. Their stats are also skewed by their listless start and late surge during that wild hot streak that propelled them to a weak playoff seed.
Nashville also struggled to those same "defensive results" with much stronger goaltending than Edmonton.
Edmonton's defensive results are heavily "offense-driven". Since the coaching change, less extremely so...but it's still very much a "best defence is a good offense" approach. Which...they've got the horses to run that way and have that dominating possession offense look on the stat sheet like "good defence". But those aren't always the same thing. That doesn't always inherently come with great in-zone defence, terrific back pressure and neutral zone defensive structure, or super responsible puck management for example.
