Sooner or later this season, there are likely to be games come along for the Edmonton Oilers that will be labeled and promoted as a ‘Statement Game.’
This wasn’t one of them, exactly.
The statements the Oilers needed to make with Thursday night’s return to Rogers Place did not necessarily involve the result itself, at least in terms of defeating a specific opponent, but statements they absolutely needed to make about themselves after failing to compete in any area of the game Tuesday night in Minnesota.
Head coach Dave Tippett, who gave everybody a day off Wednesday, returned to the rink for the morning skate Thursday and didn’t dodge it.
“I’m interested to see how our team responds. It’s our first bit of real adversity. We struggled last game. How are we going to react to that? And I think our players will respond the right way.”
When they come back with two third period goals to tie it 3-3 and win it in overtime, you have to declare that they did.
The bottom line was that the Oilers didn’t come to compete in Minnesota. This night they did. And they didn’t fold their hand before the dealing was done.
Yes it was the Dynamic Duo that did it surrounded as usual by a quiet rest of the lineup. But Connor McDavid, who scored to send it to overtime and Draisaitl won it in overtime with his second of the game, had been quiet for two games themselves.
So who is going to knock it?
Draisaitl’s goal in extra time was his eighth to give him the Oilers record for OT goals with eight, one more than McDavid.
So Edmonton is now 8-2-1 and who is going to knock that either?
The Oilers clearly came to the rink looking motivated to play responsible, committed hockey.
After being blanked in back-to-back games on the road, the first priority was to score the first goal of the game. Two-thirds of the way through the first period, Darnell Nurse bounced one in off the stick of Dmitry Orlov to end the drought at 165 minutes and 58 seconds of failing to dent the twine.
It went in the net. But it didn’t break the seal.
Oil Spills podcast: McDavid, Draisaitl can’t do it all for the Oilers
The Edmonton Oilers are flying high to start the 2019-20 NHL season, but even teams that touch the top of the standings can see their star players fall off a bit as seen in recent games.
Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl didn’t crowd the scoresheet in a win over Detroit and in a shutout shootout loss to the Jets, which once again underscores the need for the Oilers to conjure goals from their secondary lines.
Host Craig Ellingson talks to hockey beat writer Derek Van Diest about McDavid, Draisaitl and the forwards as well as the team’s continually solid goaltending.
And then the 2018 Stanley Cup champion Washington Capitals burst Mikko Koskinen’s bubble with three unanswered sandwich-session goals to give them a 21-6 record in goals for-against in the second period through 12 games this year.
It was a game about preserving their home ice superiority and making Rogers Place a venue the visitors take to the ice not expecting success during the Ken Holland-Dave Tippett era that’s just getting underway.
Despite not scoring a goal in the two-game road trip to Winnipeg and Minnesota, the Oilers came home with a 4-0 record in Rogers Place and started 4-0 Mikko Koskinen in goal.
Koskinen could be faulted to different degrees on all three goals but the fact is that Alex Ovechkin scored two of them, his eighth and ninth of the year and 666th and 667th of his career, and it’s hard to point a finger at a guy who had a letdown with two goals in 47 seconds and three in a span of eight minutes when the eight-time Rocket Richard Trophy winner as the NHL’s top goal-scorer is waving his wand.
Edmonton is now 5-0 at home and Koskinen is now 5-0 for the season.
The Oilers were 8-19-4 in Rogers Place last year, 19-18-4 the year before, 25-12-4 in 2016-17 en route to making the playoffs the only time in the last 13 seasons and 19-20-2 in their inaugural season in the building.
It was a game in which the Oilers needed to prove that they weren’t going to follow up with an empty effort, and then compound their lapse into a total relapse involving a string of seriously poor performances and turn a run of success into a serious skid.
Edmonton has watched this team do that again and again, the most memorable recent example being the hiring of Ken Hitchcock to replace Todd McLellan’s 9-10-1 team on Nov. 20 in San Jose and had them 17-12-2 by Dec. 11 only to be 23-24-5 by Feb. 19 and continue to flounder the rest of the way.
To most people following from afar, the biggest fascination of what would transpire in the tilt involved the sudden slide of McDavid, who went into the game, for only the second time in his career, with a three-game skid of shooting nothing but blanks.
McDavid was facing the possibility of his first four-game pointless streak of his 298-game NHL career.
It was a game about rebooting the Dynamic Duo on a night featuring last year’s only two 50-goal scorers in Ovechkin and Leon Draisaitl.
With The Great 8 and the German Gretzky getting two each, Draisaitl gets the game puck with the winner.
And the Oilers get a game to use to tell themselves they are a team of substance now, not whatever the heck they were Tuesday in Minnesota.
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October 26, 2019 at 12:01AM
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