Wins right now only hope for Oilers to save season
Now or never.
The Edmonton Oilers are staring at four-game eastern road trip that can either save or sewer their season, and if they don’t do something with it, they might not want to come back home.
Fans in Edmonton aren’t paying the fourth-highest ticket prices in the National Hockey League to watch another five-month funeral march to the draft lottery.
But that is a very real possibility if this team can’t pull out of its mystifying nose dive.
The Oilers are already six teams and seven points out of a playoff spot, a deficit that can still be overcome — provided they start now.
If the gaps stretches to 10 or so points by the time they get back home, they are very likely done.
“It’s on all of us,” said winger Milan Lucic, who understands how grave the situation is becoming.
“The hole that we’ve dug ourselves … eventually, you have to start doing something about it and stop feeling sorry for yourself.
“It comes down to the players taking over like we did last year and playing the way that we can. That’s what it’s going to take for it to turn around.”
To be sitting here in November without having won two games in a row all season is mind-boggling for a team that had its sights set on a deep playoff run.
Right now, it can’t even put a good week together. Watching them get walked over by a mediocre Detroit Red Wings team in a game the Oilers desperately needed to win at home (where they have won three of nine games) shocked everyone in Edmonton.
“You have an opportunity to keep things going in the right direction after an effort and a win like last game (6-3 over New Jersey) and it doesn’t happen,” said Lucic.
“It just sucks that we have to start all over again.”
After a lot of losses this season, the Oilers pointed at the schedule and told everyone to ‘relax, it’s still early.’ Well, it’s not that early anymore.
When they come back from this road trip, the Oilers will have played 20 per cent of the season.
It’s stunning to think that the year could get away from them for good by the middle of November, so they’re trying not to think about it.
“I’m not paying attention to that,” Connor McDavid said of the growing concern. “It doesn’t matter what other people think, or the media or the fans think, it matters how we feel in here.”
And how they feel in there is definitely not how they felt last season, when they were strong and confident and all aspects of their game were tight.
This year, everything is a mess. They are the lowest scoring team in the league, their penalty killing is in last place, their 25th-ranked power play is a shadow of the group that finished fifth in the league last year.
You flip to the NHL scoring race and the defending Art Ross winner isn’t even on the front page of the leaderboard.
“I don’t think anybody expected us to be in this spot right now, for sure,” said Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. “Some games, we’ve shown what we can do. Then other games we put a lot on net, and we just can’t find a way to put it in. I don’t really have an answer as to why right now. It’s within ourselves to get out of it.”
Head coach Todd McLellan knows they are teetering on the brink of disaster here, perhaps one bad road trip away from an absolute catastrophe.
“You don’t get to participate in April or May hockey at .333,” he said of their miserable winning percentage.
“You sure don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.”
Whatever is ailing the Oilers, they need to snap out of it, fast. A lot of the old habits we saw during the 10-year rebuild are starting to creep back into the dressing room, and that’s a frightening thought.
“The effect of losses accumulating also plays on the mentality of the team, the belief system,” said McLellan. “We worked hard for two years to get it up. Now it’s being tested, so we’ve got to put some performances together.”