Before free agency even opened, the Oilers made one of their quieter but more important moves of the summer: they brought back Jason Dickinson on a five-year deal worth $4 million annually. At the time, that number didn’t exactly jump off the page. After the rest of the market started settling, though, it looks a lot more reasonable.
That’s the trade-off with Dickinson. He gives Edmonton one of the league’s better defensive centres, but the offense has always been the question mark.
And for most of his career, the scoring has lived in the modest range. Then came 2023-24, the one season that looked completely different.
Dickinson put up 22 goals and 35 points with the Chicago Blackhawks that year, the only time he has ever reached double digits in goals. It was the kind of season that makes you stop and wonder whether there’s another gear in there somewhere, or whether everything just lined up perfectly for one run.
The answer probably leans heavily toward the second option.
Last season, Dickinson’s production drifted back toward his usual level. In 64 games, he scored seven goals and 17 points.
Strip out the 2023-24 spike, and his normal pace sits around nine goals and 19 points over an 82-game season. Even in 2025-26, he was tracking toward nine goals and 22 points, which is right in that neighborhood.
The strange part is that there isn’t an obvious reason for the explosion. Natural Stat Trick shows Dickinson logged a career-high 1,058:18 at five-on-five in 2023-24 and scored 19 goals and 28 points at even strength, but he also played more than 800 five-on-five minutes this past season and never came close to matching that output.
And no, this wasn’t some hidden Connor Bedard effect.
His most frequent wingers that year were Joey Anderson and Colin Blackwell. Anderson, 28, played a career-high 55 games that season, but only appeared in 18 NHL games during the 2024-25 season and none in 2025-26. Blackwell is an NHLer, but he scored eight goals and 12 points in 44 games that year.
There were a couple of things working in Dickinson’s favor during that breakout season. Health was one of them.
He played all 82 games, the only time in his career he’s done that. The season before, he missed just four games and still managed nine goals and 30 points.
He also saw power-play time in both of those seasons, logging 52:07 in 2022-23 and 63:04 in 2023-24. That was a big jump from the rest of his career, though his actual impact on the man advantage was limited - one power-play goal in 2022-23 and two in 2023-24.
The biggest clue, though, is buried in the shooting percentage. Dickinson has a 10.6 per cent mark for his career.
If you remove 2023-24, that drops to 9.1 per cent. During his big season, he fired 126 shots and scored on 17.5 per cent of them.
That ranked tied for 31st among players with at least 50 games, which shows it wasn’t some impossible number league-wide - just one that doesn’t fit Dickinson’s usual profile.
So no, another 22-goal season probably isn’t coming. But a small bump in production next year? That’s not far-fetched.
If Dickinson is deployed the way Daily Faceoff projects, with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Kasperi Kapanen on his wings, that line doesn’t really have a natural offensive driver. Still, if it’s matched more often against other teams’ third lines, there should be chances to chip in.
If Edmonton uses that group against top opposition, it could also free up Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl’s lines to feast on softer matchups while Dickinson’s line handles the hard work.
A realistic jump would put him around 12 goals and 25 points in 2026-27. Anything north of 20 goals would require either a much higher shot volume or another stretch of finishing luck that lands right around that 17.5 per cent mark from 2023-24.
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