It may have been a while since the Edmonton Oilers have played a game, but it was even longer for the Florida Panthers heading into this game. One paper and visually the Edmonton Oilers were the better team but a couple of breakdowns that lead to goals have once again hurt this team.
One problem for the Oilers throughout this season has been the fact that they will control the play for the majority of the game, but they will make one mistake and that mistake will end up in the back of their net. Tonight was a great example of that, if you watched this game tonight, it was obvious that the Oilers were the better team, but the Panthers were able to capitalize on a couple of OIlers errors to score their two goals before the empty net addition at the end of the game.
After the conclusion of this game, the Edmonton Oilers can handle the loss in two different ways. They can hold their head high saying that they were the better team who had the better chances and should have won and if they remove the big errors they should win. They could also go the other way and think that was the best they could have played and they still go the loss.
Oilers fans know that the Oilers can play better than that, but the thing that the Oilers need to do is not make any 10-bell errors. This is the Stanley Cup Final and these are the two best teams in the league, so if you make a mistake at the scale the Oilers did tonight you have to expect them to end up in the back of the net.
Both of the errors came with the Nurse/Ceci pairing on the ice. The pairing was taken apart last series by Knoblauch but put back together tonight. Judging on how they played I would expect them to be split up again. Both of the goals were while they were on the ice and the second goal was a direct missed coverage by Nurse. Now I know both of these defencemen can play better and they have in the playoffs, so hopefully this was just an off night. If not this could cause trouble for the Edmonton Oilers.
As for the battle between the pipes, it is not like Stuart Skinner played a bad game, as mentioned above the chances that he faced may have been few a far between, but they were high quality. As for Sergei Bobrovsky, he played an excellent game, which does scare me moving forward. Getting shutout in the first game is nerve-racking because the Oilers players are going to start squeezing their sticks a bit tighter cause they think it is impossible to score on him.\
If the Edmonton Oilers are able to score first in the next game then I think the Oilers will win. The longer the Oilers go without beating Bobrovsky the more concerned I become. A goalie with the skill of Bobrovsky has the ability to steal a series, but if the Oilers can prove that they can score they can wipe that doubt out of their own heads.
Game 2 will take place on Monday, there is a lot of time from now till then for this team to put their heads together and figure out what needs to be done. I think it is fairly obvious what needs to be done, they need to eliminate the big blunders. If the Oilers can do that they should be able to skate away with the win.