Oilers’ inconsistency exploited by St. Louis
One step forward, one step back — or, if you want to go by the standings, seven steps forward and 12 back.
It’s probably no surprise that the 7-10-2 Edmonton Oilers are having trouble dealing with success this season, given how little of it they’ve actually had, but it’s becoming a very serious problem.
Nineteen games into the season and they have yet to win back-toback games at home. A quarter of the way through the schedule and they have yet to win back-to-back games in regulation.
Just when things looked like they might finally be turning in the right direction, they get rolled over at home by the St. Louis Blues. Ouch.
“They’re the top team in our conference and they came out and showed it tonight,” said Oilers goalie Cam Talbot, who kept a 4-1 loss from getting out of hand. “We were a step behind all over the ice and they made us pay. We just didn’t manage the puck coming across their blue-line. We turned it over a few times and fed their transition. We’ll learn from this one.”
That’s debatable. The Oilers have been in this position several times this season, left to explain their wild inconsistency, and very little seems to ever be learned from it.
“Last year we did a really good job of sticking with it and playing the same way over and over again,” Oilers centre Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said with a sigh. “We have to get back to that. We need to find a way to get streaking a little bit, putting wins together. If we don’t do that, if we keep going one win, one bad game, it’s not going to work out at the end of the year.”
No it’s not.
After whipping Vegas 8-2 to go 4-2-1 in their last seven, the Oilers looked comfortable again — much more comfortable than any 14thplace team has a right to be.
“They were better than us in a lot of areas tonight,” Oilers head coach Todd McLellan said. “We get to the blue-line and they had the tenacity (while) backchecking to shut things down. We wanted to play east-west at the blue-line, and as a result we turned it over and it went the other way.
“They capitalized on some opportunities that we fed them. It wasn’t our best. If we throw our best at them, I think we come away with a chance to beat them, but we weren’t close to being our best.”
Hard to imagine why they weren’t given what was at stake, but McLellan is right: The Blues’ top players were all over the scoresheet while Edmonton’s best guys had a rough night.
Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl accomplished very little, and ultimately put the game out of reach when the captain’s soft giveaway in the offence zone led to a two-on-one the other way that made it 3-1.
“That (first) line was guilty of it, but so were the other three,” McLellan said. “It was team-wide tonight — it wasn’t just the one line.
“It was spread out among the team. It was a team loss tonight. We just didn’t play well.”
Asked if this team has adopted the habits of so many Oilers teams before it — being quick to rest on its laurels — McLellan emphatically said no.
“We played well the whole road trip and didn’t take a step back,” he said. “What I would say is I thought the Vegas game didn’t set us up really well for this game. It was a completely different type of game.
“We still had a little bit of Vegas in our game, in our mindset, the free lanes and the passing and extra second that we didn’t have. We couldn’t get that out of our system quick enough.”