Articles in Edmonton Oilers

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

The rookie goalie had never had it happen to him before, while the 750-game defenceman could only rub his prodigious beard and mutter, “Never seen anything like it.”

Oilers fans will recall the Miracle on Manchester back in 1982? That was when the Boys on the Bus squandered that 5-0 lead and lost a playoff game to the Kings, 6-5 in overtime.

Well, Mattias Ekholm watched in amazement from the bench as a new chapter in this Kings-Oilers rivalry played out, a broken goalie stick that nearly forced a Game 7 in a series the Oilers had in the palm of their collective hand.

It was the Fluke on Figeuroa, and it darned near sent us all home for an edgy Game 7 at Rogers Place.

“It's okay that there's some drama in the story,” said head coach Jay Woodcroft, whose team is penning a new chapter in Oilers lore once again this spring.

With Edmonton leading this series-clinching game 4-3 and set to put it away on a powerplay with 12 minutes to play — goalie Stuart Skinner gathered a puck at the top of his crease as defenceman Evan Bouchard peeled away to the corner awaiting the puck.

He was, Skinner said, “just trying to hit Boosh with a nice, crisp pass.”

Then, his goal stick buckled. It had been cracked earlier by an Adrian Kempe whack, but that damned CCM waited for the least opportune moment to crater.

Skinner fanned on his pass, Phillip Danault cashed the easiest shorthanded goal of his career, and the game was suddenly in the balance.

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Watch the goal below.

Edmonton defeated the LA Kings 5-4 to advance to round 2.

Below watch the game winning goal, handshakes and highlights.

from Helene Elliott of the LA Times,

If the Kings have any resilience left in their bruised and weary bodies, if they can figure out how to repair the gaping holes the Edmonton Oilers ripped open in their defense during the last two games of their Stanley Cup first-round playoff series, if they want to prolong a promising season, they have three days to find that resilience, those solutions, that fight.

For the second straight game, the Oilers revved up their offense to a level the Kings couldn’t match. The particulars are less important than the undeniable trend: Nick Bjugstad scored twice as the Oilers chased Kings goaltender Joonas Korpisalo to the bench in favor of Pheonix Copley in the second period and roared to a 6-3 victory Tuesday night at Rogers Place.

The Kings have until Saturday, when Game 6 will be played at Crypto.com Arena, to reflect, repair and regroup and try to extend their season to a seventh game Monday in Edmonton.

“That’s obviously not good enough. It wasn’t close to good enough,” Kings coach Todd McLellan said of his team’s defensive effort. “It probably doesn’t get you a win in Game 2 of the regular season, so move on.”

Or move out.

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Watch the game highlights below.

from ESPN News Service,

Zach Hyman scored at 10:39 of overtime as the Edmonton Oilers rallied from three goals down, authoring a potentially season-saving victory in a 5-4 decision over the Los Angeles Kings Sunday night.

Hyman's snap shot from the left faceoff circle was his first goal of the playoffs, ending a dramatic, rollercoaster ride of a Game 4 as the Oilers evened this first-round playoff series at 2-2.

"It was a great breakout pass," Hyman said about his first playoff game-winning goal. "I looking for a pass and it turned into a Grade A scoring chance. I was able to get it up and over and that was the game. It is probably the most important goal in my career."

Leon Draisaitl had two goals and an assist for the Oilers, Evan Bouchard had a goal and two assists while Evander Kane forced OT with his third-period goal. Connor McDavid had three assists.

"I think all playoff games are big tests, but this one was massive for our group. I thought we responded well," said Draisaitl, who leads the league in playoff scoring with nine points. "It is not an easy team to come back against. We came back in waves in the second period and put ourselves back into it."

Jack Campbell, who came in after Stuart Skinner was pulled after one period, made 27 saves against his former team.

"I've constantly touted that we have a good goaltending tandem. We have belief in both of our goaltenders," Oilers coach Jay Woodcroft said. "That's not assigning any blame on Stuart for how the first period went. But I felt that our team needed a little bit of a change in momentum, give us a different kind of look. The only debate I had was when I was going to do it."

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Game highlights are below.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

You can distrust the Situation Room all you want if you think there is some grand conspiracy through which the National Hockey League wants its best player and most explosive offensive team eliminated as soon as possible.

You can say the referees graded out somewhere between poor and brutal here in Game 3 on Friday — because that would be accurate.

The officials are not biased, just well below an acceptable level of competent. And if you judged that their unpredictability likely hurt the Edmonton Oilers a call or two more than it did the Los Angeles Kings in Game 3, I wouldn’t give you an argument.

It's time for the Edmonton Oilers to play like the highest-scoring team in hockeyPlay VideoPlayMuteCurrent Time 0:00/Duration 2:23Loaded: 6.90% Fullscreen

Whine about the calls all you want, Oiler fans, in a game where the power plays were 5-4 in favour of the Kings.

But here’s why the Oilers are down 2-1 in this series, after a 3-2 overtime loss, the second time the Oilers have coughed up a power-play goal in OT in this series.

They are down because an Oilers team that averaged four goals per game all season can’t solve the Kings often enough at five-on-five to win these games. The Kings are hanging around, hanging around, and for the second time in three games, the Oilers left themselves at the mercy of the refs — and paid for it.

Edmonton trails this series because it has blown a lead in every game. Because, tied 2-2 after 40 minutes, the Oilers couldn’t find a hero from amongst their stable of scorers, while the Kings found theirs.

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Game highlights are below.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

The Los Angeles Kings did not lead Game 1 for even a single second. But they’ll lead their Round 1 series with the Edmonton Oilers for at least two days — and maybe more — after a 4-3 overtime win that left a Canadian hockey city in a province of shock.

Hang around? Oh boy, did these Kings hang around.

The Oilers took a 2-0 first period lead into Period 3, and still had their two-goal lead with just eight minutes to play in what — to that point — was a near perfect playoff performance by the home side.

Then, suddenly, it wasn’t.

“Got to be more mature than that,” said two-goal man Leon Draisaitl. “It’s a 3-1 game with eight minutes left or whatever. We’ve got to lock that down.

“We have to be more mature.”...

The Kings scored on the final two — at 19:43 of the third period with the goalie pulled to send the game to overtime, and then Alex Iafallo in OT with big Vincent Desharnais in the box.

“We had the game in our hands. We just let it slip away,” Desharnais said. “We took too many penalties, and they just bury you at some point.”

read on

Watch the game highlights below.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

“It takes a lot of heartbreak,” Nurse explains. “This is my eighth year here, so I’ve gone through seven seasons where you haven’t reached the goal that you want to reach. There’s a lot of heartbreak, a lot of work that goes into it.

“I read Nick Lidstrom’s book [Nicklas Lidstrom: The Pursuit of Perfection, written with Gunnar Nordstrom and Bob Duff], and the amount of times that [Detroit] had to actually go and play in the playoffs, and get through the ups and downs of the playoffs before they were actually successful? I mean, it’s time and time again.

“You look at the teams that win — the amount of work, the amount of attempts that they had to take at it to get to that Stanley Cup. It’s not an easy task.”

“There’s a hunger in the room that there’s still another level that we need to get to.”

Welcome to Edmonton in 2023, where a rebuild that began back in 2010 with the first-overall selection of Taylor Hall has finally produced a legitimate Stanley Cup contender. The sun may have dawned a handful of seasons ago, finally bringing an end to The Decade of Darkness, but the trip back into the light has been like a walk from the banks of the North Saskatchewan River to 101st and Jasper Ave.

All uphill.

more

from Adam Vingan of Sportsnet,

The 2022-23 Edmonton Oilers have the greatest power play in NHL history.

That is not hyperbole. The Oilers have scored on an incredible 32.4 per cent of their power-play opportunities this season. That would stand as the highest single-season rate since the NHL began tracking power-play percentage in 1977-78, when the Montreal Canadiens finished at 31.9 per cent. As long as the Oilers do not go 0-for-4 against the San Jose Sharks on Thursday in their regular-season finale, the record will be theirs. (The Oilers have gone 0-for-4 or worse only four times this season.)

Of course, it helps to have Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, who have combined for 52 goals on the power play, which ranks ahead of 15 teams. Draisaitl’s 31 power-play goals are tied for third most in a season in league history (Tim Kerr's 34 in 1985-86 is the record).

The four forwards on the Oilers’ top unit — McDavid, Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman — have remained constant. Tyson Barrie ran the point until the Oilers traded him to the Nashville Predators on Feb. 28 and Evan Bouchard has since replaced Barrie. The No. 1 unit has not missed a beat since Bouchard took over for Barrie, scoring 17 power-play goals in 18 games. (Hyman missed two games in mid-March.)

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from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

With one game to play in the regular season and an eight-game winning streak intact — the Edmonton Oilers longest such streak in 22 years — we are starting to wonder.

Does it really matter who the Oilers play in Round 1? Or where they finish in the Western Conference standings?

If they play like this, is anyone going to upset them in Rd. 1?

“It's a good time for us to get rolling here,” began goalie Stuart Skinner, after a 2-1 overtime win at Colorado that kept the Oilers alive for top spot out West heading into Game 82 on Thursday night. “A good time for us to feel good about our game. Feel confident.

“You know ... It's kind of an unspoken feeling. But it's important to have that going into the first round.”

Skinner credits Oilers' defence for limiting Avalanche's power play chancesPlay VideoPlayMuteCurrent Time 0:00/Duration 1:13 CaptionsFullscreen

They might not be talking about it, but everyone else is.

The Oilers have won eight straight, they’re 18-2-1 since GM Ken Holland’s trade for Mattias Ekholm, and they’ve allowed four goals total in their past six games — never more than one in a single game.

“We're just buying in right now, and it's great to see that everyone sees what the results end up being,” said Ekholm, who at this time is the most impactful player acquired at the 2023 NHL Trade Deadline. “We've tried to do the right thing defensively before we go on the offence and it's paying dividends.”

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from David Staples of the Edmonton Journal,

There’s been no shortage of doubters and haters when it comes to the work of Edmonton Oilers GM Ken Holland, but with Edmonton the hottest team heading into the 2023 NHL playoffs, an argument can be made that Holland deserves the Jim Gregory General Manager of the Year Award.

Holland has not come close to winning the award before, as it came into being in 2009-10, just as his great Detroit Red Wings team were starting their slow slide into mediocrity.

By the time Holland stepped down from the GM role in Detroit in 2019, many fans and hockey pundits had turned against him, including commentator Jim Costa of ESPN 96.1 in Michigan, who launched a vitriolic attack on the departing GM. “I am bitter”, Costa said. “This man destroyed my hockey team for a decade… Ken Holland drove this franchise into the ground.”

Travis Yost of TSN had a more sober but somewhat critical view of Holland’s work and of Edmonton’s hiring of him that spring of 2019: “No one is ever going to take away that blistering run of success that is front and centre on Holland’s resume,” Yost said. “But those runs were many, many years ago. And years after those runs the Red Wings have no immediate future, thanks in large part to so many crippling long-term contracts given out to aged-out veterans or players who never had a prime in the first place. Outside of Detroit, no team needs more immediate help managing against the salary cap than Edmonton. That’s what makes the Holland hiring so curious.”

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from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

They’ll always be known for their offence, and another six-goal day like the Edmonton Oilers laid down on a Saturday afternoon in San Jose drives that point home like a Leon Draisaitl one-timer from the right-wing circle.

But, on the afternoon where Connor McDavid became the first 150-point player in his lifetime, it’s the “one” in the 6-1 victory that makes us feel more and more like the Edmonton Oilers have finally arrived as a genuine Stanley Cup contender.

“Being solid defensively leads to wins. We know that, and we’ve played well defensively,” said McDavid, whose Oilers are on a 12-0-1 run and have allowed just three goals in their past five games. “It's been a good run. We need to keep it rolling here. It’s a big one in Denver.”

The win sends Edmonton into Tuesday’s game at Colorado just two points behind Conference-leading Vegas, with two games to play. Edmonton holds the tie-breaker, so they have two games left (in Colorado, at home to San Jose) to make up two points on Vegas, who has a home and home left with Seattle.

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Catch the game highlights below.

from Damien Cox at the Toronto Star,

For his next trick, the fabulous Connor McDavid just might bring the Edmonton Oilers kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Yep, McDavid is that good.

That’s not to say the Oilers are a backward organization. Nothing could be further from the truth, and that gorgeous rink the taxpayers built for them in downtown Edmonton is certainly in the conversation every time the subject of best NHL arena comes up.

It’s more a case that when it comes to reference points, for a long time now Oiler fans and media have been stuck somewhere between 1984 and 1990, the start point and end point of the NHL’s last true dynasty. If an Oilers team isn’t tough enough, it’s because it doesn’t have Dave Semenko riding shotgun. If an Edmonton goalie doesn’t come through in the clutch, he’s not a money goalie like Grant Fuhr. If the Oilers score six or seven goals in a game, they supposedly remind everyone for one night of the great offensive squads led by Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Paul Coffey and Jari Kurri.

Every team, of course, likes to embrace the best parts of its past. It’s natural. But at a certain point, the past becomes so distant it starts to lose relevance. In the case of the Oilers, comparing the challenges of a 21-team league when everyone used wooden sticks to the current swollen 32-team NHL in which fighting is essentially extinct and everyone can shoot the puck 120 kilometres an hour started to lose relevance quite some time ago.

Those Edmonton teams that featured Gretzky et al were so uniquely entertaining and so high-powered that to some they were always going to be the gold standard for the Oilers.

Until, possibly, now.

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via the YouTube page of Sportsnet,

Ken Holland joins Scott Oake and Louie DeBrusk on After Hours to chat about the nucleus of the Oilers and their open window, what it's like breaking trade news to players, and a career path that almost came to fruition.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

There is a big difference in playing against this Edmonton Oilers team, when the six-foot-two, 210-pound Kane is patrolling the left wing. And his teammates know it.

“(We’re) just more physical,” said Connor McDavid. “Bigger, faster. All the things that his game is all about.”

“He's a big body. He's physical. He's intimidating,” begins the Oilers' well-spoken winger Zach Hyman. “He's not afraid. He gets in on the forecheck. He can fight. He can score. Not many guys have that combination of skill and grit these days and he's somebody who has both.”

Kane is an above-average skater and shooter of the puck. He can pass it well enough to trade pucks with the likes of McDavid or Leon Draisaitl, though admittedly, Kane is more finisher than set-up man. He plays physical and is willing to fight, a dying art in today’s game.

“He plays with a lot of pace,” McDavid assessed. “He's a big, strong guy who gets in on the forecheck hard. I wouldn't want to be a D and go back to retrieve pucks with him (bearing down on you).”

Kane scores at an above-average rate, 13 times in 15 playoff games last season, and 15 in an interrupted 35 games this season, including the winner in Thursday’s 2-0 victory over Los Angeles. He also led that game with eight hits.

It’s been a long year, between having his wrist stepped on by Pat Maroon in November (missed 31 games), and breaking a rib shortly after he returned (missed nine more).

more

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

So, you’re saying there’s a chance…?

If the Edmonton Oilers were going to go into these last two weeks of their schedule with even the faintest prayer of chasing first or second place in the Pacific Division, a regulation win here in Vegas was compulsory on Tuesday.

Then the Los Angeles Kings lost in Calgary, and the Oilers put up a touchdown on Vegas.

In as dominant a win against a top tier team as we’ve seen all season, Edmonton chased Jonathan Quick, went three-for-three on the power play, and pounded the Vegas Golden Knights 7-4 — a team that Edmonton could well meet in Round 1 of the playoffs.

“We play like we did tonight, and we’re out,” said Golden Knights coach Bruce Cassidy of that possible matchup, after his club picked up two points in its final two games against Edmonton, while the Oilers nabbed three.

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Watch the game highlights below.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Can you possibly play staunch, responsible, mistake-free NHL hockey for a full 60 minutes, in a building that feels like equal parts frat party and Golden Bears game?

How can you play like an NHLer when you’re Zach Hyman — who played his college hockey at Michigan — and it feels like Home Coming Weekend on a sudsy Saturday night in the Big 10?

“It’s like going back to college. A weird, kind of throwback environment,” Hyman said.

In front of a sold out house of 4,600 people — roughly 60 per cent of them here to cheer and drink beer for their Edmonton Oilers — the Oilers eked out a 5-4 win against a game bunch of Arizona Coyotes.

It was Edmonton’s only trip here all season, and one that will linger this morning in the heads of a boisterous and boozy contingent of Northern Albertans on vacation.

What a blast this was, for both player and fan, as Edmonton won on its maiden voyage to tiny Mullett Arena on the Arizona State University campus.

“The sensory input,” began Nick Bjugstad, traded from Arizona to Edmonton at the deadline, “I think the first time a team comes into this arena it's a little bit of a shock. The fans are right on top of you, therefore the rinks even smaller.”

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I recently heard someone say that Edmonton fans sure like to talk about “the good old days”. Well, on one hand this franchise “has” a past. Many NHL teams do not. I get a little tired of people who seem eager to dismiss that. The way I see it, it sure as hell beats the alternative. You don’t hear Toronto and Montreal try to distance themselves from theirs, both great NHL frachises.

-Kurt Leavins of the Edmonton Journal where you can read more on the Oilers.

All from Connor McDavid.

Jack Michaels with the call.

Interview with McDavid near the end of the video.

from Daniel Kaplan of The Athletic,

NHL star Evander Kane said in judicial papers filed last week that he wagered sometimes as often as 50 times a day, which is in large part why he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with liabilities topping $26 million.

Kane’s post-trial brief, in the lawsuit brought by his biggest creditor, Centennial Bank, laid out the player’s family background and tried to explain how that played a part in his spiraling debt in spite of overall career earnings that have reached $76 million.

“Kane was raised on the east side of Vancouver, which at the time was a lower-class area of the city,” the post-trial brief reads. “His mother Sheri was a stay-at-home mother when Kane and his sisters were growing up because they could not afford daycare.”

“Kane was drafted by his first team when he was seventeen years old, and he began playing professional hockey straight out of high school at the age of eighteen,” his lawyers wrote in the post-trial brief, which the judge requested after the trial, which took place on Jan. 23 and 25. “He has never taken any college or college-level courses, nor any courses or training about accounting, money management, or business development (and the NHL does not provide any financial education to its players). Although Kane became a highly compensated athlete in his fourteen-year career, he was raised in a working-class family that never owned a home, struggled financially, and lived month-to-month.”

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from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Ryan McLeod was like the kid who played with fire, and then watched the whole barn burn down.

And up in smoke with that barn went two points that the Edmonton Oilers absolutely wasted in a 7-4 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

“Self-inflicted wounds,” was how Evander Kane best described it.

“You can't you can't give a team like that anything easy,” echoed Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

With his team holding a comfortable 3-1 second-period lead, McLeod committed the cardinal sin. He passed the puck through his own slot.

Not up the boards. Not a bank shot off the end boards to the defenceman on the other side.

McLeod did what every Canadian kid knows to be the equivalent of, “Never lick the soccer posts on a cold winter day.” He moved the puck through the danger zone, which just happened to be inhabited by one of the most skilled hockey players on the planet — Mitch Marner.

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Watch the game highlights below.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

It’s crazy how history repeats itself. But here we are, 40-some years later, and we can’t wait for the same hockey game to start.

Toronto’s prodigal son will return Saturday night, skating out of the visitor’s gate under the glare of the Hockey Night in Canada lights in the jersey — must we say it? — of those damned Edmonton Oilers.

Again.

First, it was Wayne Gretzky, the Brantford kid who is the best there ever was.

And Saturday night, Newmarket’s Connor McDavid — the most dynamic, productive and exciting player in the game today, by a margin that increases each season like a Secretariat lead as he rumbled down the stretch.

In only the second Saturday night game here in his career, we all suspect that McDavid would love to follow in the steps of The Great Gretzky, who saved his best for those Beatles-like visits to the old Maple Leaf Gardens back in the ’80s. There, amidst throngs of screaming fans out on Carlton St., Gretzky averaged a goal and 2.6 points per game in his career.

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The first time in his career.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

The Edmonton Oilers can’t keep the puck out of their net, can’t get a save when they need one, and the big boys are taking this thing back to where it was years ago: A travelling offensive circus that shows little affinity for the dirty, defending parts of the game.

For the second game in a row, the Oilers blew a three-goal lead, losing 6-5 in overtime to the Colorado Avalanche. One game after coughing up a 4-1 lead against the New York Rangers, they leaked away leads of 3-0, 4-2 and 5-3 before losing for the eighth straight time when a game extends past regulation time.

“We score enough goals,” began honest depth winger Warren Foegele, who had a pair of goals and kept his shifts to a tidy 37 seconds, on average. “The mentality has to be to defend. We're definitely capable of that — it's just having the right mindset. Like, we don't need to score more goals. We're up (by) three.

“So we’ve got to take shorter shifts and stay above guys. For some reason, we're just not doing that.”

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