From the left: Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Zach Hyman, and Evan Bouchard of the Edmonton Oilers celebrate a power play goal against the Los Angeles Kings at Crypto.com Arena Los Angeles, Calif., on April 28.Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
So far in their series, the Oilers have outscored the Kings, blown them out and come back on them (but lost in overtime).
The biggest knock on Edmonton is that it’s vulnerable in goal. So on Sunday night it ground out a 1-0 win.
Four days, four games and four different ways of playing well. It’s like watching a dog spot a treat, then run through every trick it knows in quick succession.
Every little thing is going right. Connor McDavid is not only playing like the No. 1 player in the game. He’s making the guys beside him look like Nos. 2 and 3. If goalie Stuart Skinner has decided to chip in a few man-of-the-match-type performances, that is a powerful combination.
No one seriously doubted the Oilers could beat Los Angeles. Going wild on the Kings has become a sort of annual prairie rumspringa. But since the most up-to-date NHL thinking is that sweeps are bad for momentum, is it possible the Oilers are just showing off?
No, no. No, no, no. Nobody wants to talk like that. The better the Oilers perform, the more depressive their head coach, Kris Knoblauch, sounds.
“We can’t always dictate how the game’s going to go,” Knoblauch said after Sunday night. “We’re going to have to win a lot more games like tonight.”
So you have the best player, and maybe the second-best player (Leon Draisaitl), and possibly – at least right in this exact moment – the third-best player (Zach Hyman), but you don’t get to dictate how the game’s going to go?
It’s possible that the Oilers win the next one 10-0 and Knoblauch weeps in his postgame presser. And if so, he would not be wrong. Whatever’s happening in Edmonton right now, it’s working.
With the usual wave at ‘long way to go here,’ what the Oilers seem to be proving this year is the value of a strong shock to the system.
Like other Canadian teams we can think of, the Oilers were meant to treat the 2023-24 campaign as an extended training camp. Time to tweak a few things and get their legs under them. Their regular season would begin in April.
Most teams planning on having a disaster year take a few days to warm into it. Not the Oilers. They lost their season opener 8-1.
They lost six of their first seven, and 10 of their first 12. The Oilers would have been better off calling in sick for all of October, and then showing up tanned and ready to go in November.
It wasn’t just losing. It was the way they did it. Again, like the dog and its tricks. They were getting blown out, come back on, squeaked, goalie’d and knifed in overtime. Like every one of the characters in Clue had cornered them in the billiard room and was whaling on them with anything that wasn’t nailed down.
The nadir was reached in early November when Edmonton lost to San Jose. Since the Sharks are not technically an NHL team – more a bunch of guys who play hockey for the hell of it – that was embarrassing. The loss knocked the Oilers down to dead last in the league.
They did the only thing a team in an extended nosedive can do – lightened the load by throwing the coach out of the plane.
That works about half the time. The other half, it causes a chain reaction that envelops everyone up and down the organization.
Firing Jay Woodcroft and hiring Knoblauch didn’t seem like a big change. It was one anonymous minor-league tactician for another. But it got the operation back to level.
Still, by the U.S. Thanksgiving deadline – the date by which the playoff picture is semi-locked in place – the Oilers were ranked 30th of 32 clubs.
From that point, they went on an eight-game win streak, and by the end of it had only gotten back to .500.
It took them until January to get into a wild-card spot. They weren’t on solid postseason footing until February. They weren’t cruising until March.
This six-month-long emergency is what sports looked and felt like until they decided it made better financial sense if everyone made the playoffs. Fall over once and you had to spend the rest of the race at a dead sprint.
Nowadays, nobody talks about sprinting. They talk about hoarding their resources, and trying to get everyone healthy, and how it takes time to get all the boys on the same page. How many pages are in this book they keep referring to? Can’t they read it over a weekend? Why does it take months to get through?
While other teams could afford to dawdle through the deepest part of winter, the Oilers were in a full-blown panic. If this team had missed the playoffs, everyone on top was getting fired. If Edmonton had missed them as badly as it looked like it might in November, all options would have been on the table. Calls to give McDavid his compassionate release onto a team that cares would have picked up.
That possibility seemed to make an impression. So here we are.
The Oilers aren’t anyone’s idea of a favourite. They let in too many goals. They don’t have much depth or history. And however good they look right now, this is the same team that tripped out of the gate in October and spent a whole month skidding on its face across the floor.
But if things continue in this vein, maybe more can’t-miss teams ought to spot their opponents a 10-game lead to begin the season. In this country at least, it seems to concentrate minds.