Oilers on the winning end of third-period flurry

Resilience has been rare this season, but team refused to let the Blues walk away

Resiliency hasn’t really been part of Edmonton Oilers’ vocabulary this troubling season, but the word made a loud appearance Thursday in a big statement comeback against the St. Louis Blues.

This looked a whole lot like last year’s never-give-up Oilers after the two teams went almost 50 minutes without a goal. People were looking through the record book to find the last 1-0 overtime or shootout game, after 35 other ones in their history, when all hell broke loose in what ended as a 3-2 Oilers victory.

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too,” said goalie Cam Talbot, who had the last 1-0 game, a shootout win in Montreal last February, but instead watched as Mike Cammalleri and Connor McDavid rallied the Oilers after Blues’ goals by Tage Thompson and Patrik Berglund.

Then Drake Caggiula knuckled the winner over Jake Allen with 49 seconds left to give the Oilers their first three-game winning streak of the season.

A month to the day after the Oilers hit rock bottom with a 8-3 loss in St. Louis, the Oilers refused to go quietly into the night. If this had been November, the Oilers would have dropped this one 4-2 with an empty netter.

“You go down by a goal twice to a team like that and battle back — yeah, the resiliency in this group right now is what we saw last year,” Talbot said.

The Oilers hit five posts in the first 45 minutes before finally breaking through on Cammalleri’s screened shot to tie it 1-1 just 38 seconds after Thompson’s first NHL goal.

“We needed one of these games because we hadn’t gotten over the hump, winning three in a row,” Talbot said.

The Oilers were in a 2-1 hole until McDavid finished off a Leon Draisaitl feed to tie it with just less than four minutes to go.

“You want to think that (it’s automatic),” Talbot said with a laugh, “but one way or the other they’re getting a good scoring chance. If the goalie comes across and makes a great save, good for him but when those two are on an odd-man rush, there’s usually some magic going on.”

McDavid agreed.

“Yeah, great pass from Looch (Milan Lucic) first off to get it over to us and we were able to build some speed, and when Leon has the puck on a two-on-one, more times than not, he’ll make a great pass,” McDavid said.

Caggiula, who had a physical, hard-driving game, got a bit lucky on his winner but he was in the right place at the right time. He saucered it over Allen off a Ryan Nugent-Hopkins pass for his first goal in a month.

“It was a little bit in my feet and didn’t get all of it,” he said. “But all I’m trying to do is get it on the net.”

Or in the back of the net. Until the late flurry, everyone on the ice was trying, but no one succeeding.

“We had lots of opportunities tonight where we could have folded our hand and gone to sleep, but we didn’t,” McDavid said. “Couple of pucks laying in the crease, goalposts, it seems we were one pass away and couldn’t convert, but they started to go in late and that’s something that hasn’t happened for us this season.”