It didn’t look great.
An Edmonton Oilers club stumbled out of the gates with a 2-9-1 start to last year’s regular season just wrapped up their 2024-25 pre-season schedule with the exact same energy.
Or, rather, a lack of it.
Winding down an eight-game exhibition schedule by losing twice in convincing fashion to the Settle Kraken and Vancouver Canucks by getting outscored by a combined 10-3 as teams trend closer and closer to opening-day lineups might not be the most convincing way to steady the fan base heading into the regular season.
For the ones who haven’t buried their heads in the sand while telling themselves the Oilers are simply saving it up for when things actually matter, anyway.
After finishing the pre-season with a pedestrian 3-5 record, the majority of which was manned by players who won’t be seeing a ton of ice time coming up, if they’re still even on the roster at all, the Oilers took a badly needed — though not so much well-earned — day off Saturday in preparation for the journey to come.
It all begins for real Wednesday (8 p.m., Sportsnet) against the visiting Winnipeg Jets, which marks the first of four home games in a span of seven days to open the regular-season schedule, while six of their first eight will be played at Rogers Place.
Theoretically, that should give the Oilers an opportunity in the first 10th of the schedule to double the amount of wins they earned by the time Jay Woodcroft was fired in mid-November of last year, after going 3-9-1 behind the bench.
It was a sad, sorry start by a team brimming with talent, experience and, of course, expectations, with many experts, pundits and prognosticators pointing straight to Stanley Cup contention, only to be shown up by a squad that underperformed at everything but taking black eye after black eye.
Early on, at least.
Kris Knoblauch rode to the rescue and, using the same tools available to him as his predecessor, tinkered with the mechanism on the way to a 46-18-5 record. In the process, it became a well-oiled machine capable of bouncing back from the smallest to the biggest of adversities, putting together win streaks of eight and 16 games to climb into the playoff picture and, ultimately, overcome an 0-3 deficit in the Stanley Cup Final to reach Game 7.
And that’s where we last left off with games that counted.
The saying goes, it’s not how you start but how you finish that matters. But it’s hard not to imagine if things had gone just a bit more smoothly early on, the Oilers would have made things at least a little easier on themselves at the end, when a single, solitary goal was the only thing separating them from hoisting their first Stanley Cup in 34 years.
Instead, they took the eight-hour flight home in stunned silence over what could have been, already counting down the 107 days they’d be waiting before getting a redo.
Only, they’ll never quite get that chance again. Not with the exact same dressing room, anyway.
While their top-six point scorers from a season ago are all back, free agency, front-office maneuvering and injury has subtracted Evander Kane, Warren Foegele, Ryan McLeod, Cody Ceci, Vincent Desharnais and Sam Carrick, while unmatched offer sheets by the St. Louis Blues saw them bid farewell to young playoff-proven prospects Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg.
Added to the equation are Viktor Arvidsson, Jeff Skinner, Vasily Podkolzin, Ty Emberson and Josh Brown.
Then again, that’s almost window dressing on a team led by Connor McDavid, who was every bit as much the problem early on last year as he was the solution.
As their captain goes, so go the Oilers. And McDavid started out about as invisible as it gets for one of the games brightest superstars, coming into last season with a “Cup-or-bust” mantra only to sit in a 26-way tie for 113th overall in league scoring at the time of the coaching change.
What happened from that point on was nothing short of McNificent, as he put the art in the the Art Ross trophy race, at one point drawing within single digits of the lead on the way to finishing in the top three and posting the NHL’s first 100-assist season since Wayne Gretzky in 1991.
In the playoffs, no one could touch him. Leading the way with 42 points (eight goals, 34 assists) in 25 games, McDavid mounted a monumental comeback against the Florida Panthers in the final on the way to being awarded the Conn Smythe trophy as post-season MVP.
In historical terms, only one other forward from the team that lost the Cup had ever received the Conn Smythe before.
And if that’s the McDavid that shows up to the rink Wednesday to pick things up right where he left off, both last year’s start and the ho-hum pre-season that followed will become a distant memory.
E-mail: [email protected]
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge