Youthful Oilers are now grizzled playoff warriors
This year’s roller-coaster ride draws comparisons to Oilers’ playoff run in 1982
History Lesson No. 1 (Recent):
The Edmonton Oilers were defeated 7-0 in Game 4 by the San Jose Sharks and rebounded to win games 5 and 6 and win the series.
History Lesson No. 2 (Distant):
Fans spilled into the streets when the Oilers defeated the Carolina Hurricanes 4-0 with complete domination in Game 6 of the 2006 Stanley Cup final, sending the series to the limit with the community convinced Edmonton was going to win a sixth Cup. Home-ice advantage kicked in and the Hurricanes won 3-1 in Game 7.
Think on that for a spell. Now think about this.
No matter what happens next, these first-time-in-the-playoffs-in-11-years Oilers are getting three years worth of Stanley Cup playoff experience in one. And now they are about to play a Game 7.
And no matter what happens next, Edmonton fans are getting what almost seems like 11 springs worth of playoff hockey excitement, entertainment and exceptional experiences in one Stanley Cup season.
I mean, it’s phenomenal how much this hockey club has gone through in every direction and how much Stanley Cup experience it has already acquired.
So far this spring, you could make a case that Edmonton has gone through the combination of events from the first two years of Oilers playoff history in 1980 and 1981 and are now taking on the third, the Miracle On Manchester experience of 1982.
This young, wet-behind-the-ears hockey club Sunday set themselves up, after their Disaster At Disneyland if you will, to do what Wayne Gretzky and the gang couldn’t do in following the legendary Miracle On Manchester game in Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles Kings came back from being down 5-0 in the third period in one of the greatest comebacks in history with the Kings winning 6-5 in overtime. That was in Game 3 of a best-offive series. The Oilers came back and won Game 4. But they lost the deciding game.
On Friday in Anaheim, the Oilers gassed a 3-0 lead on the three extra-attacker, pulled-goaltender situation with 31/2 minutes to play and then lost in double overtime.
The difference between 1982 and 2017 was this year’s edition of the Oilers responded with one of the most one-sided major recoveries ever Sunday, winning by a 7-1 count.
Can they follow up and now do what the Miracle On Manchester Oilers couldn’t do in ’82? Can they go from no experience as a group to take all these exceptional experiences forward to a Western Conference final against the Nashville Predators?
So much has happened with this Oilers outfit that head coach Todd McLellan had called a “growth team” all year that suddenly it’s mesmerizing to contemplate the extent in which they’ve grown in their first two Stanley Cup playoff series.
I mean, think of everything they’ve been through already. They’ve blown 2-0 and 3-0 leads in this series and went out and got up 5-0 after the first period Sunday to minimize the loss of two top-four defencemen in Andrej Sekera and Oscar Klefbom. They’ve twice been hosed on goaltender interference situations. They’ve been to overtime on two occasions in this series and been dealt two losses in those games, including one in double overtime after allowing three goaltender-pulledin-favour-of-an-extra-attacker goals in 31/2 minutes.
They’ve been up 2-0 in the series after playing the first two games on the road and lost the next three.
They have proven they know how to overcome.
“Our season was on the line and I thought we played like it. If you ask me, that was a desperate group,” said Mark Letestu, the Elk Point product and graduate of the Bonnyville Pontiacs who scored two goals and had two assists in playing second banana to Leon Draisaitl’s hat trick and five-point night in Game 6.
“It’s nice to go through this grind together, especially considering I think this group is going to stay together and learn from all these experiences.
“Game 7 is going to be something else we can say as a group we’ve been through together. Now we’ll see how we approach that challenge on Wednesday.”
People are already forgetting there are a dozen players making their playoff debuts this season.
With that in mind, McLellan was asked by a Los Angeles Times writer if they realized what was happening.
“I do think they know and that they do understand what’s happening,” said McLellan.
“The one good thing about the inexperience is that some of them don’t have the understanding of the impact that the media has or the scrutiny they are under. They just come and play.
“There is a little bit of an innocence to a lot of them, so they show up and battle. That inexperience is going to get tested on Wednesday. We know that.”