OILERS LOSE ONE THEY NEEDED BADLY
Worst road team in league — the Devils — comes into town and doubles up edmonton
People say games such as Wednesday night’s — against a slumping, tired team decimated by injuries and with nothing to play for — are the hardest ones to win.
Those people are stupid. Tampa Bay is the hardest game to win. San Jose is a tough night.
Dispatching what’s left of the 28th-place New Jersey Devils at home, with Edmonton’s playoff lives depending on it, should have been the easiest game the Edmonton Oilers had between now and the end of the regular season.
It was not. It was a frustrating and agonizing slow-motion car crash. You couldn’t watch, but you couldn’t turn away. After everything the feisty and determined Oilers had done to get to this point, how do they lose 6-3 to the Sisters of the Poor?
It was beyond ironic. The Devils had lost seven in a row and were outscored 16-6 in their past three. They just got pounded 9-4 by Calgary. They are the worst road team in the league playing the second of back-to-backs.
This was supposed to be one of those nights where if the Oilers put in a hard night’s work the two points were theirs. It was close to a guaranteed win night as you’re ever going to get.
Instead, they were on their heels all night. The Oilers were down 1-0 early on a bad one from goaltender Mikko Koskinen. They gave up a late one to let New Jersey to tie it 2-2 after 20 minutes. They were down 3-2 in the second, with the pressure mounting as a crowd that came to see a savage beating grew more and more restless by the shift.
Six minutes later it was 4-2 after another bad one from Koskinen. In came backup Anthony Stolarz as the pressure in the building turned to fear. Four minutes later, it was 5-2 Devils, and the Oilers were in full crisis mode. Matt Benning provided hope with a goal late in the second period, but a short-handed goal buried Edmonton for good.
BEWARE THE LOSER
Everyone knows that you have to be on guard when you play an opponent that just got pumped for nine goals the night before. The Oilers know how they’d feel after getting whipped like that, so they were bracing for a fired up Devils team on Wednesday.
“If that happened to us we’d be pissed off,” Benning said. “We’re athletes, we’re competitive by nature, so anytime you lose a game, no matter what the score, you’re pissed off. If you’re not pissed off then maybe this is the wrong sport.”
THIS AND THAT
An epic first-period fight between Milan Lucic, in his first game back from a hip injury, and New Jersey’s Kurtis Gabriel brought the crowd to its feet. The bout lasted one minute and five seconds with both guys landing some solid shots … Koskinen got the hook after giving up four goals on 18 shots … Connor McDavid’s second-period assist gave him 100 points for the third straight season … Alex Chiasson’s goal gives him 20 on the season. The Oilers have two 20-goal scorers, a 30-goal scorer, a 40-goal scorer and 17 players in single digits.
A LITTLE HELP?
The Oilers don’t control their own fate in this chase. They will need some help from the teams ahead of them, but waiting and hoping for that help is the best way to stumble and fall. So as much as the out-of-town scoreboards impact their fate, they aren’t obsessing over them.
“We just have to win games,” said McDavid. “It doesn’t matter what anyone else does.”
CIRCLE THE WAGONS
The Oilers were pronounced dead again Wednesday night, which is nothing new. McDavid admits part of what motivates the team is the fact they’ve been pronounced dead numerous times along the way. It’s become a rallying point as they circle the wagons and attempt to prove everyone wrong.
“It would have been easy to roll over and die a couple of weeks ago or a month ago with the negativity around our team from fans and media,” the Oilers captain said. “We always kind of believed we could put together a run and we’ve been able to do that a little bit to give ourselves a little bit of a chance. There’s obviously still a lot of work to do, there’s a long way to go.”