OILERS’ ARROGANCE DID THEM IN
After falling behind, they couldn’t catch up to expectations, Robert Tychkowski writes.
You aren’t the only one who thought the Edmonton Oilers would be a lot better this year. So did they — and that might have been the problem.
As they packed up their stuff and went their separate ways for the summer after missing the playoffs by 17 points, the Oilers admitted they might have been caught up in their own hype.
“I don’t know if we just thought it would come easy this year, that we could just step in and pick up where we left off,” Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said, “but we need to remember how hard it was to get where we got last year.
“Every game was a battle. Every single game, we fought extremely hard. We pushed teams as far as we could. It’s something that just didn’t happen this year.”
Connor McDavid also sensed that the Oilers got caught up in believing how good they were and assumed it would happen all over again based on talent alone.
“Nothing is given,” he said in his exit interview with the media at Rogers Place. “We came back from last year and everyone was feeling pretty good about themselves and we thought it was maybe just going to happen. But nothing is given in this league, everything is earned, and we learned that the hard way.”
Instead of challenging for a Stanley Cup like they and so many others expected, they spent all season chasing their tails. It made for a frustrating year.
Once it started going south, they were too rattled to stop it. The season got away from them early, and that was it.
“If you get off to a good start your confidence is good, you’re buzzing, everyone is feeling great,” Leon Draisaitl said. “But you lose four games and all of a sudden everyone is panicking, nobody has confidence. That’s kind of what happened to us.
“We were too inconsistent as a team to even give ourselves a chance to make a push for the playoffs.”
“Peter (Chiarelli) alluded to it earlier when he said death by a thousand cuts,” McDavid said. “That’s the best way to put it. When the power play was going well, the penalty kill wasn’t. When we were scoring goals, we couldn’t keep them out of our net. When we were stopping goals, we couldn’t score. Everything that could go wrong went wrong.”
Having said that, McDavid believes the Oilers still have it in them to turn this thing around as quickly as next season without a major overhaul.
“We’re definitely closer than our record shows,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to say that when we were sitting out of the payoffs two moths ago, but I do think we’re much closer than we sit today.
“Individually, everyone needs to have a great summer, work hard and be hungry to go next year. There’s not much reason to feel (overconfident) coming into next year. Guys should be hungry to go.”
Nugent-Hopkins has been through more years of rebuilding in Edmonton than he cares to remember, and doesn’t think they’re in one, or need one.
“We’re not rebuilding. We’re a good team,” he said. “We’re close. We’re right there.
“We have to find it again. It was there last year. Nothing ’s changed — we have the same team. We just need to have the same mentality we had last year, the killer instinct.
“I’m not management, but if nothing changes I don’t think it’s an issue at all. Everyone will have a good summer and come back hungry. We’re all frustrated. We’re all disappointed in ourselves. I know we’re going to come back hungry.”
Asked what has to happen over the summer to make sure this doesn’t happen again, Draisaitl agreed that it doesn’t extend beyond the players in the room.
“To be really honest, straight up, we just need to be better,” he said. “It’s as easy as that, really. It starts with me. We all have to be better.”
The good news is that after what happened this year, they’ll have something to prove again next year.
“At the end of the day, I hope the lessons we learned from this season, that I learned from this season, we turn it into a positive and come back ready to play next year,” Milan Lucic said.
“We need to remember the feeling we went through this whole season so that we do’t have to relive it.”
Everyone needs to have a great summer, work hard and be hungry to go next year. There’s not much reason to feel (overconfident) coming into next year.