The Oilers The Ryan Shea Surprise Could Be Bigger Than It Seems

As The Hockey Writers Brian Swane wrote recently, there’s always a player who sneaks up on you during the preseason. It’s not necessarily the biggest name. Not necessarily the guy everyone was talking about when training camp opened. Just somebody who starts doing a few things that make you wonder where he came from.

For the Edmonton Oilers, that player might be Ryan Shea.

Shea arrived this summer with a pretty straightforward job description. The 29-year-old defenceman signed a five-year, $20-million contract after spending last season with Pittsburgh, and Edmonton was bringing him in partly to help fill the hole left by Darnell Nurse. That’s no small assignment. Nurse played nearly 21 minutes a night last season and led Oilers defencemen in both hits and blocked shots.

But something interesting happened in Shea’s first couple of preseason games. He didn't look like the safe, steady defenceman Edmonton expected. He looked like he might contribute a little more. Shea scored twice in preseason games. Against Winnipeg, he picked his way through traffic, walked into the slot and fired a shot past Thomas Milic. Against Calgary, he came off the point, took a pass from Kasperi Kapanen and one-timed the puck past Dustin Wolf.

Add two assists against Winnipeg and a plus-five rating, and suddenly Shea had four points in two games.

Oilers fans shouldn’t expect Shea to become a 30-goal scorer.

Now, obviously, nobody should start projecting 30 goals because a defenceman scored twice in September. That’s not how this works. Preseason statistics can be fun, but they can also be wonderfully misleading. What matters more is what those goals might tell us about the player.

Shea’s reputation is built around being dependable in his own end. And that could actually make his offensive flashes more interesting, not less. Edmonton doesn't necessarily need Shea to become another Nurse. Just a bit more reliable.

Nurse brought physicality and big minutes, but his game could also become adventurous. Shea appears to offer Edmonton something different: predictability. Get the puck, make the right play, defend properly and don't turn every shift into an adventure.

And if there’s some offensive ability hiding underneath all that? All the better. That's a pretty useful bonus.

The Oilers are changing how their blue line plays.

This is where the Nurse trade becomes more interesting. Edmonton isn't simply replacing one defenceman with another. The Oilers are changing the mix on the blue line. Maybe the plan is to become a little more structured, a little more predictable, and a little less dependent on individual players solving problems on the fly. If so, Shea could fit that perfectly.

Of course, the regular season is a different animal. The games get faster, the checking gets harder, and nobody is giving away the middle of the ice quite as generously as they do in September. So let's not get carried away. But there’s a secondary story here worth watching.

Edmonton paid Shea $4 million a year because the organization apparently believes his dependable defensive game has value. If he turns out to be more than that — if he can defend, move the puck and occasionally make something happen at the other end — the Oilers may have found themselves a rather useful piece.

Shea might become more than a replacement for what the Oilers lost.

And maybe that's the bigger lesson from this Edmonton offseason. Sometimes replacing a player isn't about finding another version of the player you lost. Sometimes it's about finding a player who lets you play a little differently.

Ryan Shea might be the early clue that this is what Edmonton is trying to do.