5 questions Oilers need to answer during 6-game homestand

5) Will the Oilers win the overall home stand?

While the Oilers were actually more successful on the road last season, their 23-12-6 record at home wasn’t exactly shabby. Regardless, Rogers Place has not exactly proved to be a fortress so far in 2023-24.

In fact, consider that the Oilers went 1-4-1 in their first six games at home this season. And that one win actually come at Commonwealth Stadium, in the Heritage Classic against the Calgary Flames.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the Oilers have been much better at home since. They’ve won their past four at Rogers Place, with an overall 21-7 goal advantage.

Now though, we get to see if the Oilers can take advantage of a long homestand, not that it will be easy. We’ve already mentioned their struggles versus the Wild, while their first game of the homestand will be against a Hurricanes team which doubled them up 6-3 just two weeks ago in Carolina.

The Oilers will also finish the homestand with two games against the Lightning and Panthers. During the recent road trip out east, it included a 6-4 loss in Tampa and 5-3 defeat in Sunrise.

This all leads to the question of if the Oilers can win this overall homestand. In reality, nothing less than four wins out of six will do, as they look to prove they are indeed back after their horrendous start to the 2023-24 season.

It helps that the middle two games will come against the New Jersey Devils and Chicago Blackhawks. As much as the Oilers themselves are currently in a similar position, these are two teams near the bottom of their respective conferences.

For what it’s worth, four of the six teams the Oilers will face during this homestand have losing records on the road so far in 2023-24. However, we appreciate that all the statistics in the world don’t mean a thing on paper – it’s about producing the results on the ice.

Overall, these are interesting times for the Oilers and this six-game homestand will tell us a lot about where this team is at. As much as it won’t make or break them per se, we’ll have a good indication by the end, of how realistic their playoff chances are.