Well, the Edmonton Oilers are right about one thing — this isn’t last year’s team.
Between adjusting to the off-season changes and trying to get the intensity up after the emotional letdown of losing Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, the Oilers are barely a shadow of the team that stormed its way through four rounds of playoffs last year.
That’s fine, they were a shadow of last season’s playoff team last October, too. So there is no reason to get wound up about it. Time is on their side.
But, in being outscored 11-2 through two games of the season — 6-0 in their home opener against Vancouver and 5-2 Saturday against Chicago — the only thing the Oilers have shown so far is that there is a lot of work to do.
“Disappointing,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch. “Everything needs to be a little better — five-on-five, power play, penalty kill.
“Keeping our game simple is important. Usually when you keep it simpler you dig in, you win more battles, you make fewer mistakes. You ultimately make the game harder on the opposition. Right now we’re not making it hard on the other team.”
Everything remains a little, or a lot, out of sync right now, even against a pedestrian Blackhawks team playing the second of back-to-back games.
The Oilers were sloppy in their own end, turning the puck over and coughing up chances at an alarming rate, and the vaunted offence at a loss for answers. It took the Oilers five periods to score a goal this season — Corey Perry’s centring pass that banked in off a Chicago leg — and their second goal was too little too late on a third-period power play.
They had more than enough chances to win this game, but they look like they’ve never seen a net before.
“In two games we’ve only scored one even strength goal and that was at the end of a power play and (Chicago) shot it in,” said Knoblauch. “So we need to bury our chances. We had chances, we just needed to finish them.”
Edmonton’s penalty kill continues to adjust, just not very well, to some key departures. It’s given up five goals on six chances so far this season. On Edmonton’s fifth penalty of the season, five minutes into the third period with the scored 3-1, it took Chicago 10 seconds to salt the game away. The Hawks finished three-for-three on the man advantage.
Team defence? Eleven goals against in two games tell you how things are going on that front.
“It’s a new season, there are new guys and other guys have left,” said Corey Perry. “It’s not the same team, and we have to figure out how we want to play, the style we want to play. Right now, it’s 6-0 the first game, and then give up another five in this game. That’s not the recipe.”
In net, Calvin Pickard got the start Saturday and gave up five goals on 20 shots, one game after Stuart Skinner got the hook after giving up five goals on 13 shots.
“I’m not going to say it’s bad,” Knoblauch said of the goaltending so far. “You look at the stats and it doesn’t look very good, but I know those two can play better than they have. But I also know the team can play a lot better in front of them.”
From top to bottom, the Oilers seem locked in a mental fog that’s bogging down every aspect of their game.
“Any time a team is not playing well it’s usually mental,” said Knoblauch. “Either you’re overconfident or under-confident. Being an athlete at the top of your game, it’s a fine line. Right now I know we’re a better team than we’ve shown these first two games. We’ll figure it out.”
So they continue to walk the fine line between knowing it’s early and knowing they can pull out of something like this and guarding against complacency, thinking a turnaround is going to happen on its own.
“There is no complacency, we want to go right now,” said Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. “We did not like the position we were in last year after the start and we don’t want to find ourselves in that again. We know what’s at stake. It is important right now and we have to find a way to bounce back tomorrow.”
LATE HITS — Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’s third-period assist gives him 700 points for his NHL career. He has 251 goals and 449 assists in 883 regular season games. … Connor Bedard was the best player in the game, scoring a goal and adding two assists in the win.
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