Oilers raise soiled white flag against Philly
The thing about being a backup goaltender in the NHL is that it’s mostly about opportunity. Sooner or later, you’ll get it. When you do, you must make the most of it.
If you do, you’ll earn an NHL paycheque for quite some time. You may even end up as a starting goaltender and a star.
But for every one of those, there’s somebody else who gets his opportunities and fails to seize them.
They go up and down to the AHL for a while, but at some point get judged more suspect than prospect and, well, check out the rosters in the KHL and around the various pro leagues in Europe.
It’s on that teeter-totter that Laurent Brossoit is playing right now. And Wednesday night, one bad goal was the difference in a 4-2 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers.
The haters will be all over Brossoit with the blame, but it was the other 19 Oilers who soiled the sheets.
This is the opportunity that backup goaltenders wait to be presented with, the chance to start writing their own Cam Talbot-type of story.
Talbot wasn’t drafted. He played college hockey at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He worked his way through the ECHL and AHL to the New York Rangers and ended up as backup to Henrik Lundqvist.
In February 2015, Lundqvist suffered a ruptured blood vessel in his neck. Talbot started the next 24 games and seized his moment. That got him the starting job in Edmonton and, again, he took advantage of his opportunity.
We won’t go into the torturous roller-coaster ride that Devan Dubnyk took before finally seizing an opportunity and joining the list of top netminders in the league.
On Wednesday night, Oilers fans went to Rogers Place to focus as much on Brossoit, the former Edmonton Oil Kings netminder who played brilliantly to lead that team to the WHL title and a trip to the Memorial Cup.
Paying his dues in the AHL, he got a shot to finish up the 201516 season and gave up 17 goals in four games at the end of the season.
With Talbot out for another week or two, he has another opportunity. Obviously, it didn’t go well with his meltdown midway in the third period in Calgary on Saturday night. But the Oilers were far enough ahead they were still able to record their first win of the year without Talbot in goal.
On Wednesday night, Brossoit was given the net again, this time against the Flyers.
What we were dealing with here was one team looking to record their second consecutive win for only the second time this season, and another team looking for their third two-game win streak of the season.
Philadelphia came in off a franchise-equalling 10-game winless streak (0-5-5) with a win two nights earlier in Calgary. The Oilers had won four of their last six and, while still several shovelfuls from getting themselves out of the hole they’d dug for themselves, they could suddenly see the light above.
It was no place for a nervous goalie. Brossoit stopped all 13 shots in the first, but the problem was the Oilers had misplaced the type of game they appeared to finally rediscover in the last few games.
Still, Brossoit was there to give them the proverbial chance to win. But this Edmonton team, with the worst penalty killing in the league most of this season, kept taking penalties.
Connor McDavid set up Leon Draisaitl for a short-handed goal on one, but a terrific series of passes provided a power-play goal that couldn’t be blamed on Brossoit.
But then it happened: A shot from the top of the circle five-on-five and it leaked between the legs five-hole on Brossoit.
The problem with what happened Wednesday night is that one goal on Brossoit ended up as the focus for yet another pathetic performance by this hockey team. If Talbot had been in net, few fans would have been focused on the goaltending.
Just when you thought they were out of the funk, the team that spanked the New Jersey Devils 6-3 and returned to stink the joint out against Detroit, clobbered the Vegas Golden Knights 8-2 and returned to soil the sheets against St. Louis returned. The team that put together an impressive performance winning 6-2 in Detroit, then went to 30th-place Buffalo and delivered another dud, was back.
The club that won 4-2 in Boston and returned to soil the sheets against Phoenix reentered the arena.
If Brossoit wasn’t now 1-5-1 and not improving his goalsagainst average (3.80) or his save percentage (.872), you’d say it just wasn’t fair.