EDMONTON – How worried should we be about Edmonton Oilers a team that looks great right now?
Of course, we in the media wonder every fall how hard we should push the Oilers' annual slow start. And yes, sometimes we all overreact.
– Do you think so? proposed Leon Draisaitlwhose lethal one-shot low right is matched only by his clinical one-liners directed at a particular scribe.
Even you guys should feel some relief when, after 20-25 games played in the dark, you finally achieve a level of play similar to that demonstrated in a 6-2 win over the Winnipeg Jets.
“Sometimes you lose a little bit of confidence in your abilities and the abilities of the group. And sometimes you go into a little bit of a lull before you come out of it,” Draisaitl admitted after a 1-1-2 game in which he played just 16:10, his worst of the season. “Nobody wants to start the way we've done the last couple of years… but at the end of the day, there's a lot of confidence within our group that we know how to play.
“We just need to do it more often at the beginning of the year.”
Neither Draisaitl nor McDavid played 20 minutes in either of the last two games, this 6-2 rout of the Jets or Thursday's 9-4 win over the Seattle Kraken. Both have six points from two games while getting some rest, a win-win for a team that tends to stretch its two best players the hardest when it's performing at its worst as a group.
The fact that the Oilers are 4-2 in their last two games and 15-6 overall tells us that the two-time Western Conference champions are right on schedule. They've found their game at a fundamental level, with 53 games left to sharpen the edges to the perfection that has led them to eight playoff series over the last two seasons.
“We always believe we will find it, but we never think it will happen automatically,” he said. Ryan Nugent-Hopkinsscheduled to play in career game No. 1000 in January. “We understand this will take a lot of work and sometimes you think you're working but you're not and that can be frustrating.
“But when we stick together as a group in this room, then good things happen. And that's what we've done so far.”
With two more games left on this homestand – Buffalo on Tuesday and Detroit on Thursday – this is an opportunity for the Oilers to pick up points before heading out East on Friday for their final road trip of the season.
That's how tough their schedule has been in the first third of the season: For the first time in team history, Edmonton will complete all of its Eastern Conference travel before the Christmas break. Much like the Jets' current struggles, travel is factored into why the team is having a hard time finding its mojo.
Along the way, road-weary Jets players packed bags full of sweaty hockey gear and picked up their egos from the locker room floor.
Also, after a game in which they simply weren't competitive until the Oilers were up 5-0 with less than a period left in the game.
“It’s tough,” Jets head coach Scott Arneil lamented. “You're trying to take steps forward, you're trying to score points no matter how you do it, and this is another big step back. And we've kind of been repeating that, we need to find a way to get that consistency in our game.”
This match was not even fair: one team rested and gained momentum, and the Jets club played their seventh game in 11 days, mired in a 2-6-1 failure.
The Jets had played Buffalo at home the night before and then made the jump again for the birdie. Hockey Night in Canada in Edmonton. It's a schedule that puts them right on target for an Oilers team that is finally home, rested and finding its offensive style.
With goaltender Connor Hellebuyck out of the lineup due to knee surgery, Edmonton burned both Jets players in a game in which Edmonton led 5-0 in the 23rd minute and held on for the remaining 37 minutes.
“Because we played last night, they came at us early,” Winnipeg's top center Mark Scheifele said. “That's usually what you try to do when a team is losing back-to-back, especially on trips. We hung Comes (goalie Eric Comrie) out to dry in that first period and it's hard to recover from a four-rip loss.”
It's even harder when the game becomes five-all just 2:42 into the second period.
Wrong place, wrong time for the Jets.
The right place and finally the right time had come for Edmonton, a place where many suspected they would eventually arrive.
