Oilers fall flat to host Stars in first game of road trip

DALLAS — The Edmonton Oilers are staring at the abyss, folks.

Only two teams in the league with fewer points, Arizona, the team everybody says is god-awful, and Buffalo, where the Oilers will be the day after U.S. Thanksgiving. They can’t win at home, can’t win nearly enough on the road, definitely can’t win an afternoon game at 0-4 this season.

This is beyond shocking, not just in Edmonton, that the Oilers have seven wins at the NHL’s quarter pole after 103 points last season.

“It’s getting late early,” said Oilers centre Mark Letestu.

Why extrapolate on the Oilers’ miserable lot in life these days with three or four throwaway sentences when four words will do, eh? Letestu knows the score, even if he didn’t against Dallas.

On one of those high-wire act games, Connor McDavid was either making something happen or gritting his teeth when the pucks were going into his own net. The stats guys here didn’t have him with any giveaways — not sure what they were watching — but he had several.

McDavid was on for seven of the nine goals in the 6-3 loss to the Dallas Stars, their fourth in the past five games, which dropped the Oilers to 7-11-2. Scoring once, setting up both Drake Caggiula goals, but finishing minus-two, somehow.

And after so many outstanding games on the road, Cam Talbot gives up six in 21 shots. When they needed a save from Talbot, they didn’t get it, although Matt Benning and partner Oscar Klefbom deflected two past their goalie, who definitely wanted Antoine Roussel’s off Talbot’s skate on the first hopeful shot Dallas had in the game.

“Took a bit of a chance there but their goalie was moving,” said Roussel, who also had two assists playing with Jamie Benn and Alex Radulov and was a burr up the Oilers’ butt all night long.

The Oilers were very weak defensively in this one, never mind Talbot’s save percentage.

“Obvious to say when you give up six goals,” said McDavid.

But bottom line is, if they could win, ugly, they’d take it. Every. Single. Night.

But, they can’t and, as Letestu says, it’s far past time looking for yeah, buts ...

Especially going into St. Louis Tuesday after the Blues whipped them this past Thursday night.

“They got a lot of bounces, shooting pucks, going off guys, pretty fortunate on the redirects but we have to find ways to win hockey games. It is getting late early,” said Letestu.

“The desperation and urgency has to go up.

“Typically, U.S. Thanksgiving is the bench-mark (for making the playoffs, if you’re in, you stay in) but we’re not tracking to a spot we want to be.”

But this getting to be a broken record, these words, although Letestu says them better than most.

Adam Larsson, who was a tower playing almost 28 minutes, is tired of the same old, same old, too.

“Every game the last two weeks has been close but we have to find a way to win a game, and it doesn’t matter how it looks ... whether it’s three goals, four, 11 (scoring or giving up), we need points,” said Larsson.

What made this loss worse than many was the Stars are far from a Cup contender. They were blasted 6-1 in Tampa Thursday and had won just twice in their previous seven games.

“With a butt-kicking like that in Tampa, you don’t look past it,” said Tyler Sequin.

They had been outscored 12-0 in the third periods over the previous eight games, and yet, they got the only two goals of the final frame by Benn and Jason Spezza.

When the Oilers needed a power-play goal, after scoring on six of their previous eight to go from 27th to seventh in the league, they couldn’t get the tying 4-4 goal seven minutes into the third off Leon Draisaitl because Ben Bishop, who came in for a leaky Kari Lehtonen and stopped all 18 of his shot attempts, stoned Draisaitl.

“Yeah, we needed that there, and we had some good looks,” said McDavid.

Draisaitl had three minor penalties (slashing, high-sticking, hooking), atypical for him.

“We spent far too much time in the penalty box, 12 minutes after we got the lead and that played an impact,” said Oilers head coach Todd McLellan, who took Draisaitl off McDavid’s right side and put Caggiula there, with Draisaitl moving to right-wing with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

“They scored some ugly goals, but those all count.”