Clearly, the Edmonton Oilers didn’t come to Rogers Place Sunday night planning to produce another installment of what head coach Dave Tippett Tippett called “mucky, ugly, chip-it, ping pong hockey” to win another game.
Without a doubt, the Oilers came to the game preferring to play their fancy, pretty, creative pass-it-into-the-net, out-score-their-mistakes, fun run, go-go game.
With Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Jack Kassian back in the lineup, Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid were reunited. And certainly fans came to the game with the hope that former Oilers coach Ralph Krueger might be interested in letting Jack Eichel and his other young thoroughbreds run.
But what Tippett has yet to completely sell his new squad on here is that if you come out and play that gritty, gutty, away-game hockey at the start of a game they can have more fun than a barrel of Gretzkys at the end of the game.
So that seemed like the appropriate place to being conversation with Tippett in the post-game press conference.
“You noticed that, too, Terry?”
It was hard not to.
“I was like the fans. They were yelling at us to shoot the puck.
“In the first period we had more drop passes than we had shots on net.
“It was like our big guys felt not we got a couple of guys back into our lineup, let’s go.
“We came out and we didn’t have the right mindset and it cost us a point,” he said of the 3-2 overtime loss to the Buffalo Sabres.
“As the game went on, we started to play the game the right way and started to put some pucks to the net.”
The big boys, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl failed to produce a point and Draisaitly turned the puck over on the winner in overtime.
It took until near the end of the second period for Darnell Nurse to just fire a nothing-fancy shot at the net that was redirected by Joakim Nygard to tie the game 2-2.
The Buffalo Sabres, on the second-game of a back-to-back with only one win to show for their last nine games on the road, ended up restricting Edmonton to six shots on goal in the third period after getting only nine shot of their own in the last two periods, to take the game to overtime where Colin Miller won it.
With the Arizona Coyotes winning in Chicago the night ended with Edmonton and Arizona tied for first atop the Pacific, six points ahead of out-of-the-playoffs Calgary in the Western Conference.
Sooner or later some separation has to happen and this Edmonton outfit that started the season 7-1 hasn’t helped itself by playing win-two, lose-two, win-one, lose-one hockey ever since.
To this point, in Edmonton, it’s been kind of like “He Who Must Not Be Named” in the Harry Potter books.
It’s been ‘The Stat That Shalt Not Be Mentioned’ so far this Oilers season.
Despite the set of handcuffs he’s been forced to wear, general manager Ken Holland has put together an improved hockey team. With league-leading special teams that is better in goal, upgraded on defence and, at least when not missing the likes of Nugent-Hopkins and Kassian so coach Tippett can keep McDavid and Draisaitl together, has looked like a legitimate playoff team. (Well, at least if they’re not playing against some sorry, sad-sack, second-rate team from the bottom of the standings at home in Rogers Place that is.)
But ‘The Stat That Shalt Not Be Mentioned’ that has worried Oilers fans to this stage of proceedings is that Edmonton was a playoff team at Game 31 last season. Then they went 7-17-4 in the following 28 games.
Troubling, too, is the way the rest of the Western Conference standings look.
Sooner or later some separation has to happen and this Edmonton outfit that started the season 7-1 hasn’t helped itself by playing win-two, lose-two, win-one, lose-one hockey ever since.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
