Articles in Edmonton Oilers

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

They played like a team that was owed two points. As if, like the 18,297 fans, the Seattle Kraken had paid their way in to witness the mighty Edmonton Oilers dangle through another evening, just happy to have a front row seat to watch Connor McDavid tack on a few more points en route to his Art Ross Trophy.

So the Edmonton Oilers did the same, putting their feet up and taking the night off.

When it was over, and the Kraken had scored five consecutive goals to win 5-2, the Oilers said all the same things they’ve been saying for far too long now. The things they’ve been saying after each of their five consecutive losses at home.

“It is consistency. It is doing it every single night,” said Zach Hyman, an intelligent — and increasingly frustrated — spokesman in this dressing room. “We talk about it, but you have to go out there and do it for the entire game.”...

"We just stopped playing,” said Hyman, of an 11-minute stretch of the second period where the Kraken scored four times. “We weren’t tight on checks and they had a couple of faceoff goals, which we talk about all of the time. We go over things and talk about it, but it is just mental lapses and not being hard on the puck.”

Soft?

This team can be disturbingly soft, especially the blue-line corps.

If there was any disagreement over what the team needs as the Trade Deadline approaches, a night like this drives home the need for an assertive, hard-edged defenceman who can keep the slot clean.

read on

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

The injured Leon Draisaitl did not dress for Friday’s game in Seattle. When it was all said and done, he would play only four less minutes than Seattle starter Philipp Grubauer.

As it turned out, the Oilers were just fine without the NHL’s second leading scorer, leapfrogging both the Kraken and the Calgary Flames in the standings on a stunning five-point night by Connor McDavid, as Edmonton administered a 7-2 Pacific Northwest pounding of the Kraken.

“We were able to assert the game we wanted to play right off the bat,” said head coach Jay Woodcroft. “Put the other team on the back foot. We took the game to them.”

This, folks, was as stress free a hockey game as an Oilers fan has enjoyed in a looong time. Not a finger nail chewed or church candle lit.

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Watch the game highlights below.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

It’s the great quandary, and a question the Edmonton Oilers simply can not solve.

They go into Dallas, play one of the NHL’s top teams on their terms, out-battling the Stars in a game of big boy hockey that wasn’t settled until the final 10 minutes. Edmonton out-Dallased Dallas, and won 6-3.

Two days later you come home to a Vancouver Canucks team that played at home the night before, and grab a 2-0 lead after 20 minutes. A couple hours later the Canucks are jumping on their plane with a 5-2 win, and the Oilers are left with a blank stare and an empty cup, losers of three straight at home.

“It’s unacceptable,” said a visibly upset Zach Hyman. “We had a really good start and were up 2-0 and were the fresher team and then they scored five unanswered. You can’t win like that.”

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Game highlights are below.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Debuting a new look here, with the first “Things We Know” column Series 1, Volume 1....

Campbell has dealt with disappointment often. He was a first-rounder who never panned out, and it’s not easy to be that guy. Then he battled to make an NHL career for himself, and ended up in Toronto where he stole the No. 1 job. But it ended badly in Toronto and has started badly in Edmonton.

Campbell has the “I’m playing lousy” interview down to a tee. I’ve interviewed hockey players for 35 years. I’d rather see him tell his critics to (bleep) off, and play like he has a chip on his shoulder.

Be Mike Smith. The Oilers are missing the confidence and swagger that Smith brought to their room.

more Things We Know...

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Everything, as the great Bob Cole once declared, was “haaaapennninggg!”

After a game that caused Darnell Nurse to admit, “I let my teammates down,” Connor McDavid admitted something else:...

The Face of the Game isn’t even sure about the Rules of the Game.

Nurse’s poor play — he was directly responsible for two of St. Louis’ three goals in a 4-3 shootout loss — opened the door for another whacky round of video review, as the NHL’s Situation Room disallowed an overtime goal that riled up Oilers captain Connor McDavid.

Leon Draisaitl scored an apparent game-winning goal in overtime that was overturned in Toronto, where it was decided that McDavid was not in control of the puck as he entered the St. Louis zone.

Although St. Louis centre Ryan O’Reilly was waving his stick near the puck, he never touched it. McDavid cruised along as the puck went into his feet, his eyes on the puck but not his stick, and he believed he was in control of the puck the whole time.

As you watch the puck go into the skates of both players, you can argue McDavid wasn’t in control of the puck near the end of the sequence. But was McDavid in control as it crossed the line, despite the fact the puck was not physically on his stick blade?

“Since I was a kid, I thought if you have possession of the puck (going over the blue-line) that's onside. If I had possession or not, I guess that's the judgment call,” said McDavid, who was seen disciplining his hockey stick against an arena wall as he left the ice post-game.

continued, with videos...

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Jesse Puljujärvi is lost.

“Twenty games in and I have one goal. It’s sad,” Puljujarvi told Finnish journalist Tommi Seppälä, of YLE news agency, on Tuesday evening. “I’ve been thinking a lot how to do things differently. Right now, I just don’t have the answer.”

In a wide-ranging interview with Finland’s national broadcaster, Puljujärvi told the veteran reporter Seppälä that he isn’t sure if the National Hockey League is the place for him anymore.

“Of course I’d like to be a productive top-line player,” Puljujärvi said in his native Finnish, as translated by Seppälä. “But right now, it looks like I can't do that in NHL. Maybe some other league.”

Given a chance to discuss, or add to the quotes at the morning skate Wednesday, Puljujärvi politely declined.

This is where he is, where we are with Puljujarvi, the much-loved “Bison King” whose fan base in Edmonton is bigger than all but the top names on the Oilers roster.

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Connor McDavid

Then 4 unanswered goals from the Edmonton Oilers in the 3rd period to win 4-3.

Here are the Edmonton goals.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Soft and loose — it doesn’t win November, and it sure as heck won’t win in May and June.

But here are the win-one-lose-one Edmonton Oilers, trundling along playing one strong game in a row, then tuned in by a New Jersey Devils team that is hockey’s best example of an outfit that brings it every night.

The Devils won their 13th straight game, beating Edmonton 5-2 Monday night in Newark, while the Oilers haven’t won back-to-back games since Nov. 1.

After a hard, responsible win on home ice versus Vegas on Saturday, the Oilers were shy on the details and deserving of the ‘L’ as they opened up a three-game road trip with a loose, soft loss at the Prudential Center.

What’s the solution?

“We're gonna need to find a solution,” offered winger Zach Hyman. “We need to start stringing games together. Not just have a good one, then an OK one, then a good one and then a not so good one … We need to have some consistency to our game.

“And it's not early in the year anymore. We're closing in on the 20-game mark. So we need to figure that out.”

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Raise your hand if you thought Connor McDavid was going to try to cut across the crease.

Below, find all the goals scored in the NHL on Saturday.

from Travis Yost of TSN,

Having a dominant first line or a stifling top-pairing is a major competitive advantage in the NHL. Possessing both at the same time can mean the difference between fighting for a playoff spot and being a true Stanley Cup contender.

Some of the most dominant teams in league history had an elite five-man unit capable of taking the air out of games for shifts for long stretches.

The late 2000s Detroit Red Wings could get the Pavel Datsyuk line on the ice with the Nicklas Lidstrom pairing, a silly advantage that guaranteed Detroit would own more than 60 per cent of the shots on a nightly basis. The Chicago Blackhawks (Jonathan Toews’ line with the Duncan Keith pairing) and Boston Bruins (Patrice Bergeron’s line with the Zdeno Chara pairing) of the 2010s had similar success and weren’t knocked off their pedestal for many years.

It’s not difficult to see what those elite units look like in 2022. Two of the most prominent examples probably can be found in Colorado and Vegas, where the unifying of players like Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar, or Jack Eichel and Shea Theodore, has meant staggering advantages for their respective teams. They are, simply put, blowing opponents off the ice. The idea here is that the sum of the parts can be greater than the whole, even when it concerns top-tier players.

That brings me to the Edmonton Oilers and Connor McDavid. McDavid is easily the league’s most dominant player and elevates the play of everyone around him. The Oilers have tried to address the team’s blueline for years with what has been limited success, owing in part to the realities of a hard-cap league where most of the talent skews to the forward position, but also owing in part to misevaluations at the player level.

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from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

Too many turnovers, not enough saves.

The Edmonton Oilers coughed up pucks all over the ice, allowing goals in the final seconds of two separate periods, and struggling goaltender Jack Campbell was — once again — just not good enough in a 7-2 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes.

“This league is too hard to recover from self-inflicted wounds,” said head coach Jay Woodcroft, “and tonight there were a lot of self-inflicted wounds.

“Pucks that were on our tape. We didn’t guarantee it out, or we didn’t get it deep, and a very good hockey team made us pay.”

The math, it’s simple.

If you’re going to hand pucks away, you’d better have a spectacular goaltender to clean up those messes. If you don’t — and Campbell’s game is anything but spectacular since joining the Oilers — then you’d better take care of the puck.

Campbell got ventilated for seven behind a sleepy Oilers group of skaters, but was shaky on a couple of early ones when the game was still well within reach. By the time it was over it wasn’t about the goaltending, as much as it was about a team that just didn’t give itself a chance to win.

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Game highlights are below.

added 9:32pm, extended view is below...

On the other hand, it’s starting to feel as if a lot of McDavid’s big nights are getting lost in the shuffle, as if there’s one standard expected of him and a separate lower standard for the rest of the league.

-Eric Duhatschek of The Athletic. Much more ($) on McDavid, a look at Erik Karlsson and other topics.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

On the night they put the steady, consistent Lee Fogolin, and the persistent, tenacious Ryan Smyth into the Edmonton Oilers Hall of Fame, it was the New Jersey Devils who used all of the above to take home the two points.

The speedy, entertaining and opportunistic Devils scored twice in seven seconds and three times in the third period, erasing a 3-1 Oilers lead and snapping Edmonton’s five-game winning streak like an old wooden Koho on a cold Alberta day.

“I definitely feel we should have won. I definitely feel like we created enough chances,” said Connor McDavid, who scored his 12th goal in Game 11 and added a helper for his 24th point. “We probably gave up too many chances, but I thought (goalie Stuart Skinner) gave us a great chance to win.

“You have a team on the ropes… and you’ve got to put them down. You have to find a way to close that one out.”

In the grand scheme, this 4-3 loss will provide a touchpoint for third-period leads down the road. In the short term, it was simply a case of a Devils team that has found itself, reeling off its fifth straight win in impressive fashion.

They fell behind Edmonton 3-1 after two periods, and the Oilers had laid claim to this game. But the Devils are into the details, and they took this game back with a smart, structured and sneaky game plan — including the game-winner off a nice set play that caught Edmonton sleeping.

continued and the game highlights are below...

His 12th career hat trick. Edmonton defeated Chicago 6-5.

from Mark Spector of Sportsnet,

As former Face of the Game Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins arrive for a Monday night meeting and their only visit to Rogers Place this season, you may have noticed his successor has become a more eloquent, patient and cooperative spokesman this season, whose answers to questions let us in more than they ever have.

Off camera, he’s hanging around to kibitz or answer a few extra questions now, something he’s never done before. He’s asking questions now, not just answering them. He’s talking football, or golf, or whatever’s going on in the world outside the locker room.

At long last, Connor McDavid is becoming a spokesman for the game, not a prisoner of it, ready to accept the role that his otherworldly game thrust upon him long before he was ready for that part of the job.

“I am older — this is my eighth season now, and I’m starting to understand how the league works a little bit better,” McDavid said during a candid conversation Sunday afternoon, before he settled into the Chiefs-49ers game.

more

Magical.

from Avry Lewis-McDougall of The Hockey News,

The ways we watch and listen to hockey content are constantly evolving, with new ways to consume games and additional data being added to on air broadcasts.

Teams and leagues are taking the next step to put even more content on their in-house streaming services or digital networks.

In some instances, they’re ensuring a team broadcast survives at all.

In the case of the Edmonton Oilers this past week, they launched their platform known as Oilers+, a year-round streaming service with great ideas behind it that has raised a few eyebrows around the hockey world.

The paid service provides fans with unique features, original programs, pre, and post-game coverage, and practice content.

“We believe there's an audience out there,” said Stew MacDonald, the CEO of Oilers Entertainment Group. “Our fans have told us there's an audience out there that says were ready to embrace and subscribe to this.”

There's a lot on the service, and there's quite a bit of behind-the-scenes content that also features players and staff away from the rink. In an era where peeling the layers back on athletes is as big as ever, various shows on the app, from The Drop to Two Days In Toronto, do an excellent job of showcasing different Oiler personalities.

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NEW YORK (Oct. 13, 2022) – Edmonton Oilers defenseman Darnell Nurse has been fined $5,000, the maximum allowable under the Collective Bargaining Agreement, for interference against Vancouver Canucks defenseman Kyle Burroughs during NHL Game No. 10 in Edmonton on Wednesday, Oct. 12, the National Hockey League’s Department of Player Safety announced today.

The incident occurred at 20:00 of the first period. Nurse was assessed a minor penalty for interference.

The money goes to the Players’ Emergency Assistance Fund.

Watch the play below.