They wanted a shot at being the best? Well, now they’re getting it.
The best of every single team they’ll face this season, that is.
That’s what happens when you’re one of two finalists while everyone else was sent home to watch the rest of the Stanley Cup playoffs on television.
And it didn’t take long for the Edmonton Oilers to feel the effects out of the gates this year.
On the same night they raised the 2023-24 Western Conference champions banner at Rogers Place, they were blanked 6-0 by the Winnipeg Jets, and followed up with a 5-2 loss to the visiting Chicago Blackhawks on Saturday.
It’s not like it’s come as a surprise at all. The Oilers knew full well they’d be coming into this season with a bright red target placed squarely on their collective back.
They are, after all, the team to beat out west as the reigning measuring stick in the conference. And measured they’ve been.
“We know that we’re never going to get an easy game. Everyone knows.,” said Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch, whose squad had to turn right around and face a Calgary Flames side that came into Rogers Place on a 2-0-0 run Sunday (6 p.m., Sportsnet). That’s the expectation of our team that they’re prepared to play against us.”
There are worse things, of course.
It means you’ve done your job as well, if not better than everyone else — even if it makes the going get tougher from here on out.
“In the long run, that’s only going to make us better,” Knoblauch said. “You’ve got to perform and it’s going to make us better for down the stretch. But it makes it more difficult each night to win games.
“But in the long run, we’re looking at it as a positive.”
Sure. If they can rise to the occasion and match the energy the supposed underdogs bring to them game in and game out, the Oilers will definitely be better for it over the long haul. And it will be a very long haul, indeed, if they want another shot at Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.
The big question, of course, is if they can.
The alternative is getting buried under teams that, according to last season’s standings, anyway, should have no business beating the Oilers.
But that was then, and this is now.
“It’s a new season. There are new guys. Guys left,” said Oilers forward Corey Perry, who scored the Oilers’ lone five-on-five goal in their first two games, and needed the help of an opposing defenceman’s unintentional boot to make it go in Saturday against the Blackhawks.
“It’s not the same team, and we have to figure out how we want to play, the style we want to play,” Perry said. “Right now, it’s 6-0 the first game, and then give up another five in this game. That’s not the recipe.”
It may be easy to say for someone who wasn’t here a year ago, when the Oilers got off to the rockiest start in franchise history, stumbling to a 2-9-1 record that sealed the fate of former head coach Jay Woodcroft.
The Oilers were well on the rebound by the time Perry — who had plenty of problems of his own during his abbreviated time with the aforementioned Blackhawks — climbed aboard the Knoblauch Express to Playoffville.
Whether or not he can avoid an outright trainwreck and get the Oilers back on track for a return trip is as much up to the players he has on board as it is to the opposition looking to knock them off their course.
“I think teams expect us to be a hard matchup, for sure,” Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, the longest-serving member of the Oilers dressing room, said after earning his 700th career point Saturday. “That team came out and played the right way, didn’t give us anything easy and they have skill to make you pay when you do the opposite.”
Then again, this is the NHL. He could just as easily have been talking about any team on a good night. And the Oilers expect to see more than their fair share of good nights by the opposition.
At the same time, the Oilers know they can only look inward for the solution.
E-mail: [email protected]
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge