Oilers Gambling Big On Josh Brown
The free agent acquisition is penciled into the bottom pair, but his career numbers are concerning.
Oilers Gambling Big On Josh BrownSmall skill was a clear theme to the Edmonton Oilers' big acquisitions this summer.
In Jeff Skinner, Viktor Arvidsson, and Matt Savoie, the Oilers brought in three goal-scoring wingers who stand under six feet. Mike Hoffman and Travis Dermott, in camp on PTOs, are six feet tall and generally shy away from physical contact.
On defence, even Ty Emberson is praised more for his skating and hockey IQ than anything else. He's not a big, strong, punishing net-front presence.
One player the Oilers signed this offseason completely breaks the mold: 6'5", 220-pound defenceman Josh Brown. Many were confused when the Oilers gave him three years at a million dollars per year this summer. That guy? The career 7th-defenceman who's never scored more than 10 points in a season? The guy whose advanced stat cards look like this?
We know NHL GMs love size, so it's not the biggest shock in the world, but Brown just didn't make sense with the rest of the team's offseason. Now, with training camp underway, it looks like Brown's getting the first crack at the bottom pair spot vacated by Vincent Desharnais.
Clearly, the Oilers see something in Brown, enough to bet he can replicate Desharnais' successes on a pair with Brett Kulak. That pair had a 55.2% expected goals percentage last year -- the same as Cale Makar and Devon Toews.
In contrast, Brown had very poor xG numbers with all of his partners, including fellow new Oilers Dermott and Troy Stecher. If Kulak gets hurt at any point, the bottom pair could become a disaster.
Despite their vastly different results, Brown and Desharnais are similar players. Both are huge, physical defencemen with poor mobility and a little more offence than you'd think. The Oilers are betting that their coaching staff's success with their defencemen last year, including turning Desharnais into a legit shutdown guy, is repeatable this year.
That's possible -- after all, Desharnais looked completely outclassed in the 2023 playoffs, and a little more than a year later he's got a multi-year contract and the chance to play with a Norris winner in Quinn Hughes. Replicating that success with Brown is an extremely tall task, but one the front office is evidently comfortable with.
The best teams in the league have a tendency of getting the absolute most out of every player and finding value in unexpected places. The Florida Panthers made back-to-back Cup Finals with a blueline made almost entirely out of guys they got off the scrap heap (I'm also putting it on the record now that I think Adam Boqvist will be the next version of this).
The Oilers have never been the best at this. Between Brown and Ty Emberson, a third of their projected blueline are huge gambles. If they're right, it'll be a massive coup for a team with no cap space. But if they're wrong, and Brown is the same guy he's always been, they'll have just locked up one of the worst players in the league for three years. We'll see if Kris Knoblauch, Paul Coffey, and co. are truly miracle workers.
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