Zach Hyman is a man possessed, playing with a splint on his nose and a chip on his shoulder.
Of course, it’s all come too late as far as any 4 Nations Face-Off roster selection goes.
Well, eat your heart out, Team Canada.
Instead of sharing his focus with the best-on-best tournament coming up in February, the Edmonton Oilers are only too happy to have their reigning goal-scoring leader spend all his blood, sweat and tears on his own team’s pursuit of a return to the Stanley Cup Final, and a redo of that 2-1 loss to the Florida Panthers in Game 7 last June.
And bleed he has, having taken a puck to the face via a deflected Bouch Bomb from the point, complements, of course, of teammate Evan Bouchard in a 6-5 loss to those very Panthers in a Dec. 16 game billed as the Stanley Cup rematch.
The broken nose and matching black eyes haven’t slowed him down in the slightest, however, as the Oilers forward — who scored twice in that game before returning to play the third period with the aforementioned nose splint and full face shield — continued riding a streak that has seen him score 10 goals in the past nine games since returning from a five-game absence due to injury.
Prior to that point, Hyman appeared all but absent on the stats sheet, with — quite inexplicably — just three goals to show for the first 20 games of the season. Yes, somehow the hero from a season ago, who propelled his team to the playoffs with a career-high 54 goals, ended up crawling out of the gates this year at a snail’s pace.
And that’s where Team Canada’s roster comes in.
Regardless of Hyman’s hot hand from a season ago, with just a single assist to show for his first 10 games of 2024-25, and the Oilers hovering around .500 for the first month of their schedule, the selection crew looked at Edmonton just long enough to fit Connor McDavid in a red maple leaf before moving on.
And as Hyman enjoys this week’s break spending time with family and healing up whatever wounds come from the job of playing net-front, hands down the toughest position on the ice, he can rest in the fact he’s not only rediscovered his scoring touch, but his confidence as well.
“That’s life, it’s sports. It’s all up in your mind,” Hyman said. “When you’re feeling good, things are easier and things slow down. When you’re not feeling good, everything seems fast.
“Having played in this league a long time, I recognize that so much of hockey and sports are result-driven. And when you’re not getting the results, if you’ve played a long time then you know it’s about the process and about getting your looks and getting your chances and being around it.
“I think you can find confidence a number of ways and having been able to score in this league for a long time, you can kind of find confidence in that, knowing that if you continue to get the chances, that they’re going to go in.”
While his new look fits in just fine in a dressing room full of teammates whose own bodies look like they’ve been through almost half a season of pro hockey, Hyman’s face has to stick out like a sore thumb sitting around the dinner table and playing with his kids.
“They’re so funny. On the first day they are, ‘What happened?’ And then after that, they haven’t even asked,” Hyman said. “This is it, this is the new normal for now. It’s healing up.”
In other words, he’s rolling with the punches right now and taking it all in stride. It’s the same thing he had to do through the first quarter of the season, back when the numbers just weren’t adding up to everyone’s expectations.
“As long as you stick with your process and you’re playing the same way, if you’re playing well and getting looks, if you continue to stick with it and if your team has the confidence to stick with you — which obviously the coaching staff did — it was just a 20-game kind of blip,” Hyman said. “I thought I was playing well, I just wasn’t scoring.
“That’s what happens, you just have to keep playing.”
It wasn’t just Hyman, of course. While it’s easy to point to the differences in his productivity, year to year, the entire Oilers roster was going through a bit of a slump. OK, maybe a couple of superstars aside. But this certainly didn’t look like one of the last two teams standing in last year’s playoffs.
But the push is on as they hit the break having won 11 of their past 13 games to sit second in the Pacific Division at 21-11-2. And the two games they’ve lost were both by a single point to the Atlantic Division-leading Panthers and Pacific Division-leading Vegas Golden Knights.
The Oilers are simply finding ways to win right now.
“I like our resilience,” Hyman said. “The past couple of games, we were down going into the third, and in (the last) one we were up and playing with the lead and I thought we did a really good job defending the lead and not giving them much.
“I think we’re pretty confident in kind of giving up a little bit of offence to take away their offence and taking whatever is given. I thought we did a good job of that.”
E-mail: [email protected]
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge
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