Edmonton Oilers Blow Lead, Lose Ugly To Carolina
By Kurt Leavins
When a 29th place team blows a 3-nothing lead to a top-tier NHL team, you don’t like it. But you accept that the Edmonton Oilers roster is severely challenged, and you move on.
But when it happens against the Carolina Hurricanes, a really bad hockey team, well…that is NOT acceptable. How and why did it happen? 9 Things;
9. I won’t blame Richard Bachman for this loss. But the Carolina game did illustrate how a team like the Edmonton Oilers will not win games on a consistent basis without 1st Class goaltending. Bachman is a good AHL goaltender who could just not stop the bleeding.
8. The only Edmonton Oilers defenceman to play well today was Andrew Ference, who played a relatively quiet 15:26 and ended a 7-4 loss at +1. You don’t see that very often. His young charge Jordan Oesterle, on the other hand, was in trouble from his very first shift.
7. The Edmonton Oilers really lacked discipline. The Hurricanes are bad, but those Stall boys are pretty o.k., and when you keep giving them extra room on the ice, they will burn any team on the man advantage, just like they did the Oilers on Sunday afternoon. Carolina had 5 power plays, converted 3 of them.
6. When your team starts 2-3rds of the shifts in any given game without the puck, that is a lot of TOI spent in recovery mode. Once you get it, often half the shift is over, and your line is nearly gassed and ready to change. Even with your Face-off percentage at 45%, you have a chance to beat the percentages. But not below 40%.
5. There is simply not the depth to make up for the loss of a player such as Benoit Pouliot. When he came down with the flu, just before game-time, Todd Nelson had no one to effectively replace him with. Matt Fraser was pretty good today, but he was not (and never will be) Taylor Hall or David Perron.
4. To break up the theme of negativity for a moment, we at least did get to enjoy the kind of #1 center that we will be able to enjoy, for a long time to come. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins was excellent, registering a rare hat-trick in a losing cause. He and Jordan Eberle had it goin’ on today. Unfortunately…
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3. The Edmonton Oilers have to figure out how to play with a lead. When you have a bad hockey team down 3-0 and are dominating the play, to have the game then get away from you completely takes some doing. If I was Todd Nelson, I would have burned a time-out at 3-2, maybe even 3-1.
2. The Edmonton Oilers continue to play to the level of their opposition. They have shown, against really good teams like the Ducks and the Black Hawks, that “there is something there”. This team does have talent. But these swings back and forth is troublesome. I hate to always blame the roster, but fact is if the General Manager builds a better team, the team can play better. You don’t need fancy stats to figure that out.
1. The Edmonton Oilers dressed 5 defenceman aged 25 or younger, today: Justin Schultz, Keith Aulie, Jordan Oesterle, Oscar Klefbom and Martin Marincin. I often see people wanting to run veteran D-men like Andrew Ference or Mark Fayne out of town. But at the NHL level, you will not consistently win with this much experience on your back end, so be careful what you wish for. The Oilers depleted forward ranks were actually o.k. today, but the defence was horrid. Ugh.
If this team follows what seems to be its natural tendencies, they will show up in Detroit and put on a good show. But in order to start climbing the standings, not so much this year as next, winning games like today’s is not an option.
It’s an absolute must. And they know it.
O.k. Let’s move on…but…wow.