There's certainly a lot of buzz around the Oilers trading down and selecting Ryan Murray, so I decided to take a look a closer look at his stats to get a better idea of what kind of player he really is. I was concerned over the lack of progress in his playing card stats this year, but I’m feeling more positive about him now, especially with the numbers in the second table. Sorry for how terrible they look.

First up I broke down his points by 5v5 versus PP.

	Gms	5v5 G	5v5 A1	5v5 A2	PPG	PPA1	PPA2
09/10	52	0.04	0.15	0.12	0.06	0.06	0.08
10/11	70	0.03	0.09	0.17	0.06	0.14	0.13
11/12	46	0.13	0.11	0.02	0.04	0.20	0.15

I don't know how much you can glean from this, but you'll note the complete lack of secondary assists at 5 on 5 for Murray this year. In fact, he didn't pick up his 1st even strength assist of the season until January 24th. Unless you're a goon, that would almost certainly be because of poor luck. A more normal performance there would make his offensive numbers look a bit closer to what you would want from a top 5 pick.

Next, I looked at the numbers at 5 on 5 in comparison to the team. Murray's individual +/- is the "5v5 +/-" column. The "Team +/-" column refers to the entire team numbers, including Murray, but only in the games he played. The "no Murray" row refers to the team +/- when Murray was injured or playing internationally.

	Gms	5v5 +/-	Team +/-
09/10	52	+35	+64
09/10 no Murray	20		+9
10/11	70	+26	-8
10/11 no Murray	2		-5
11/12	46	+4	-20
11/12 no Murray	26		-30
11/12 1st Half	21	-10	-22
11-12 2nd Half	25	+14	+2

Clearly, at the junior level, Murray is an impact player. The difference between him and the rest of team is large, especially his last 2 seasons. And this is with him seeming to play against the other team's top lines. And the team as a whole has a drastic drop in play when he is out of the lineup.

The other thing to note is how bipolar Murray's season was this year. He was quite poor for the first half of the season. This does include the games subsequent to his return from an ankle injury but he was struggling even prior to that. I’m not sure what the issues were, but they seemed to resolve at a specific point in the season and his +/- was excellent again after that.

I'm still in favor of BPA but feel more comfortable now with the idea of targeting Murrray.