THE NEED FOR SPEED
McDavid calls for faster game
Forget everything you’ve been told about slow and steady winning the race.
The tortoise got lucky and if they ran that race a thousand more times, the hare wins every one.
Slow and steady gets you a loss. It gets you 28th place. It gets you the second-worst offence in the league. It gets you the fifth-worst goal differential in the NHL.
And, if things don’t change fairly soon, it might even get you seats on the couch for the playoffs.
The Edmonton Oilers captain put it best after Tuesday’s loss in Pittsburgh, the sixth in the last seven games for a team trying to figure out what’s wrong.
“We just haven’t been good,” Connor McDavid said.
Nope. They’ve gone from being unable to keep the puck out of their own net (19 goals against in a fourgame losing streak) to not being able to put it in the other one (three regulation goals in their recently concluded three-game road trip).
The problem, according to the fastest player in the league, is speed. The Oilers aren’t playing with enough of it.
“We haven’t been fast,” McDavid said. “Last year we were a fast team, that’s how we beat teams. We moved pucks up quick, forwards getting on their D. We were really good on the rush. And this year it just hasn’t been that way.”
Nobody’s going to argue with McDavid’s take. If anyone knows the importance of an uptempo attack it’s him.
And he’s right. This year they have a lot of guys who seem a little slow to the puck, or slow to do something with it when they have it.
Head coach Todd McLellan sees it, too.
“We’re not as quick,” he admitted. “We have to make decisions quicker, we’ve got to get to pucks quicker, we have to make plays quicker. There’s no doubt we need a little more pace in our game.”
The Oilers made a point of getting bigger over the past couple years and it paid dividends. They are no longer being pushed out of games, their skilled players are taking less punishment and their grit served them quite well in last year’s determined playoff run. They were still fast.
But things are getting off to a slow start this year, literally and figuratively. The Oilers are 2-6, six teams below the playoff cutline, and the pace just isn’t there.
The have players who can move, with McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Kailer Yamamoto (for now), Drake Caggiula and Zack Kassian to complement the bigger bodies around the net in Milan Lucic and Patrick Maroon, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. And not having access to a first passer in injured defenceman Andrej Sekera isn’t helping.
“It’s a fast game now, it’s a fast man’s game and if you’re slow you really struggle playing,” said McLellan, who believes you can still play fast even if you aren’t loaded with speedsters. “We’re not getting Usain Bolt fast over the next six days, but we can be quicker by moving pucks quicker, by getting into position quicker, we can release shots quicker, we can think quicker and anticipate better.
We have to make decisions quicker, we’ve got to get to pucks quicker, we have to make plays quicker.
“That will make us a half step faster. And we need that, we need to become a quicker team.”
TALBOT IS BACK
At least the Oilers seem to have the defensive side figured out, particularly in net where Cam Talbot was the best player on the road trip.
“Three tough buildings, five goals against in two overtime games, we’ll take it,” McLellan said. “We’ll take that on any road trip. We just need to find the net ourselves.”
Talbot said he just needed some minor adjustments to get back to last season’s form.
“I feel pretty good, I feel confident, I feel back to the way I was to finish the year last year,” he said. “Hopefully, I can continue to keep playing well and we’ll find some goals up front. I know we will.”
Talbot says he was cheating on the pass a little too much and that left him vulnerable to the shot. Now he’s zoning in on the shooter and trusting his defencemen to take care of everything else.
“I’ve started taking a little bit more ice, worrying about the pass secondary and really just focusing on the first shot, managing the first shot and battling it out from there,” he said. “I’ve been making a lot more first saves and trying not to give up too many rebounds. And the D are doing a pretty good job of clearing away the rebounds when I leave them so I think that was a big part.”