In star-studded matchup, Oilers’ depth provides the playoff-clinching response

EDMONTON — As fans are wont to do, the Edmonton market groused loudly about an Oilers team that “couldn’t beat the top teams” after a 5-0 loss at Dallas Wednesday.

But people inside the game, they take a more pragmatic view. They look down from 30,000 feet more often than the emotional fan does.

Always have.

“(That’s) not the team or the game that we are, or we want to show, on a daily basis,” said Leon Draisaitl, who notched career assists No. 500 and reached the 100-point plateau for the fifth time with a two-assist game Friday. “That being said, 82 is a lot of games, and you're going to have a couple of those a year.

“The most important thing is how you respond, and that's something over the last couple years — including the playoffs — that this team does really, really well. Respond to poor efforts or bad games.”

It was a playoff spot-clinching response by Edmonton that the Colorado Avalanche, who had played the night before in Minnesota, saw coming from kilometres away.

After a 6-2 loss in Edmonton, in which his team was outshot 46-23 and allowed six even strength Oilers goals, Colorado head coach Jared Bednar — a hockey person through and through — admitted that he had seen this Oilers train coming down the tracks from a distance.

“They got beat up the other night in Dallas,” began Bednar. “We knew we were going to see the best version of them. We may have, but we didn’t give ourselves a chance. We just weren’t good enough.

“It happens every once in a while, it happened tonight. They were twice as good as us, with twice as many shots, more than twice as many goals. It just is what it is.”

The last five games these teams have played against each other went into overtime. But the fact the Avalanche won four of those — and swept Edmonton in a playoff meeting two springs ago — has always left Colorado as the bigger brother in this relationship, a role the Oilers hope one day to claim.

On this night that climb began with a massive hit by big Swede Mattias Ekholm, who stepped up on the unsuspecting, six-foot-four, 215-pound Mikko Rantanen. Rantanen dropped like a loaf of Finnish fish bread, wobbling off the ice never to be seen again on this night.

The score was 2-2 at the time of that hit. Edmonton won the rest of the game by a 4-0 count.

“First of all, I hate to see that he was stumbling in and out of there,” Ekholm said after the game. “I never want to hit someone so that they get hurt or injured. 

“But I have seen the hit about 15 times at the intermission and I can not see anything different that I can do. I think it is a shoulder on shoulder. The play happened so fast. I usually just go looking for the puck, I usually don’t hit that much. It just happened that he wasn’t expecting it.”

Bednar didn’t like the hit, but we can tell you this: there is no objectivity in an NHL dressing room.

The true tell here are the referees, who did not call a penalty on Ekholm, and the Department of Player Safety, who we predict will be silent. We fully expect Ekholm to be on the Saddledome ice for a Hockey Night in Canada battle with the Calgary Flames.

This was a matchup of two of the game’s biggest stars in Connor McDavid and Nathan MacKinnon, a battle won on this night by McDavid (two goals, nine shots) over MacKinnon (one assist, three shots). But when teams with two top lines like these meet up the game is most often decided by the rest of the lineups, and this one followed that script.

Edmonton’s third line of Ryan McLeod (two assists) between Evander Kane (two goals) and Corey Perry (goal) were the difference makers on a night where Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch deployed McDavid and Draisaitl on the same line.

It’s a strategy that hasn’t always worked, but more and more, it’s been helping Edmonton win.

What should that tell us?

“That we’ve got really good depth,” Draisaitl said. “We have four really good lines that you can put out against anybody. Obviously it changes from game to game — from game plan to game plan. But we're a really deep team, and a group of guys that that, whatever role they get thrown at them, they embrace it and they do their job well.”

The Oilers got the bounces on Friday that had eluded on a one-point road trip through St. Louis and Dallas earlier in the week. Edmonton had two goals called back in an overtime loss to the Blues, then hit three posts in a 1-0 game in Dallas, before succumbing 5-0 to the Stars.

Against Colorado, Artturi Lehkonen inadvertently kicked a puck through his goalie’s legs and into the net, and then the Oilers won the ensuing goaltender interference challenge. That was more good luck than they’d had in a week, so when Avs goalie Alex Georgiev couldn’t squeeze a relatively easy shot — and the rebound careened into the net off of Evander Kane’s torso with 1.3 seconds left in the second period — you knew the Hockey Gods had shifted their ire away from the Oilers an on to Colorado.

It was a huge goal, sending the teams to the dressing room in a 4-2 game, on a play that wasn’t even a legit scoring chance. The goal snapped a 21-game goalless streak for Kane, the longest in his NHL career, and he would add one more in the third period for 23 on the season.

“It was nice to end the streak tonight. It seemed like that was the only way it was going to go in,” said Kane, who’d missed on breakaways and close-in one-timers, only to score on a puck that never even touched his stick

“You saw it with Brownie (Connor Brown) as well,” he noted. “It goes in off his foot and he gets a little hot for the next five or six games. Usually when things aren’t going your way you’re going to need a bit of a bounce to go your way and that’s what happened.”