Welcome to October.
We all remember it well.
The penalty killing was terrible, goaltending wasn’t making a positive difference, the team looked sloppy and detached and the Edmonton Oilers were getting smacked around — 0-3 with 15 goals against in their first three games.
And here we are again: Penalty killing is terrible, goaltending isn’t making a positive difference, the team looks sloppy and detached and the Oilers are being smacked around — 0-3 with 18 goals against in their last three games.
We’ve seen this movie before. A few times, actually. The Oilers are famous for these types of lapses and equally famous for recovering in spectacular fashion. A 16-game winning streak last year. A 22-6-2 recovery this year.
They know how to fix their problems and they know how to win.
We’ve seen enough to know that there is nothing to worry about, right?
Probably.
The difference this time is they’ve never been in a slump this late in a season. By this time last year, they had everything all figured out and were playing solid, winning hockey.
Slow out of the gate is one thing, looking this lost in late February is quite another. They’ve been a below .500 team for 12 games now (5-6-1) and seem to be going from bad to worse. They looked like the 2010 Oilers in handing Philadelphia about five easy goals in a 6-3 loss and they got run out of the rink in the 7-3 loss to Washington.
So, while you’d fully expect the Oilers to take care of this and put together a solid winning streak heading down the stretch, you can’t help but think, with all of the off-season changes, that this might be different.
“We’ll find it,” veteran winger Corey Perry said after the blowout loss in Washington. “We talked about it a little after the game and we’ll find it.
“We have guys in here who are world-class players and guys who can work. Everybody just has to pull their weight and do the things that they do well and not worry about anybody else’s job, just do their thing.”
The Oilers have pulled out of worse tailspins than this one, so it’s going to take a lot more than a three-game losing streak to scare them. They are still sitting two points out of first place in the division, after all, not gasping for air in 31st place like last November, or out of a playoff spot like they were this November.
And Kris Knoblauch believes that might be contributing to a slower recovery this time around.
“I think a lot of it is how well we handle adversity, it makes you a little more complacent,” said the second-year coach. “There’s not as much urgency to turn things around because there’s so much confidence about ‘It will be OK.’
“It’s kind of a fine line between being confident and a little complacent and overconfident. There is a lot of confidence on the team and right now we have to show a little urgency to turn the switch.”
Teams usually take the day off after back-to-back road games, but with a schedule that doesn’t get much easier from here — Tampa Bay, Florida and Carolina — the Oilers have to iron out the issues and find that switch.
“We have a lot of areas to improve,” said Knoblauch.
Perry, as Knoblauch pointed out, says the Oilers are not the least bit worried right now. The core of this team knows how to play and how to win and the collective has already proven it can string a lot of games together when it needs to.
“We started the season not great,” said Perry. “So we can look at that and look how we got out of it. All it was was hard work, putting your head down and doing the right things. You have to learn how to dig yourself out of a hole.”
The trade deadline is in five games and the post-season starts in two months, so this is when a team needs to be fine-tuning it’s game, not finding it.
“You don’t want to look too far ahead,” said Perry. “But if you get in the playoffs and lose a game you have to figure it out right away because you take too long and you’re gone, you’ll be sitting on your couch.
“All it is, and I keep coming back to the same thing, the same word, is your work ethic. That’s how you have to approach the game each and every night.”
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