IT WASN’T A WIN, BUT OILERS ARE SHOWING SOME MAGIC
If you sat down at the start of the year and circled three games to watch and evaluate the Edmonton Oilers on the front end of the schedule, you’d have picked these three:
Game 1: Calgary at Edmonton. Game 6: Edmonton at Chicago. Game 8: Edmonton at Pittsburgh.
If those were the only three games you watched so far this season, you wouldn’t be all that concerned.
One dominant win against Calgary.
One excellent overtime victory in Chicago.
One highly competitive overtime loss in Pittsburgh to the back-to-back Stanley Cup champion Penguins.
If nothing else, just avoiding a regulation-time loss in Pittsburgh, accomplished when Connor McDavid scored with under three minutes remaining, was huge.
You can’t sit back after watching those three games and the Oilers get five points from Calgary, Chicago and Pittsburgh, and tell yourself this isn’t one very good hockey club. To me, it just emphasizes the extent their heads weren’t screwed on straight that they lost the other five.
If they’d lost, despite the effort, some might have suggested, it would have been time to order up the equipment — the hydraulic crawler excavator machinery, the bucket diggers, the blast-hole rigs, the auger drilling machines, the jackhammers and the various varieties of hoes and shovels to dig themselves out of the hole.
The trouble with early season games in an 82-game National Hockey League season is that there’s so much swing on them.
There’s a big difference between 2-6 and 3-5, and that’s what the Oilers were looking at in the win-loss column going up against the back-to-back Stanley Cup champions, who had returned to Pittsburgh following a 7-1 loss to the out-of-the-gate-great Tampa Bay Lightning (8-1-1 after last night’s 5-1 win in Carolina).
The Oilers return home for a five-game home stand against five teams who went into Tuesday night’s action all either at or above .500.
Edmonton faces the Ken Hitchcock-coached (5-3) Dallas Stars on Thursday, 10-goal-scoring Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals (4-4-1) Saturday, the Penguins (5-3-2) again, ninepoint producing Taylor Hall and the New Jersey Devils (6-2) and the so-far surprising Detroit Red Wings (4-4-1).
Not including the Dallas at Colorado game, the five teams the Oilers will face at Rogers Place are out of the gate with a combined 25-16-4 record.
When you go into a homestand four games under .500, you have to win them all to come out with a modest 7-6 record, which projected wouldn’t get you into the playoffs.
At least going in at 2-5-1, you’ve got a more realistic chance to dig yourself out of the hole and get on with the season. And keep in mind the Nashville Predators went 2-5-1 to start their 2016-17 campaign en route to the Stanley Cup Final.
But maybe the best thing to do is trust your eyes. All three games on the Oilers’ road trip were 2-1.
The Oilers appear to have plugged the dam at one end. Cam Talbot may have had the wheels fall apart for a few games after his opening-game shutout against Calgary, but he totally appears to have found his 201617 form on this road trip.
The problem is, as the baseball players say, the bats have now gone cold. But the chances are there. Last night, there were a half-dozen glorious chances where either the Oilers managed to have a goal stick flung out in front of the gaping net or the shooter fire wide.
When the chances are there, they eventually go in.
The big thing, though, may simply be that Leon Draisaitl is back. Oilers head coach Todd McLellan started him on the third line. When he moved him up with McDavid on the power play, all of a sudden there were all sorts of Triple-A chances.
And in the third period, he was moved back to the No. 1 line with McDavid, and you could start to see the magic in the combination from the cheap seats.
The Oilers are returning home from the road a much better team than when they left.