Oilers believe they can beat the big boys, now let's see them do it

EDMONTON — It took Connor McDavid 15 months to finally ‘fess up in the aftermath of that lopsided Western Conference Final against Colorado two springs ago. It was in the context of the crushing loss to Vegas a year later that he told us this back in August:

“This year was different, in the sense that our belief was stronger. We competed with Vegas,” began McDavid. “The Colorado series was not all that close, and it's hard for us to look around the room and say, ‘We’ve got to do this and that,’ when they were just the better team.

“We look back at that Vegas series and it's really the small, little moments,” he said. “We felt like the series was close. That we had a real chance.”

This is the process that we’ve come to accept in hockey. That ‘School of Hard Knocks’ climb to the top which leads us to predict that — even though the Vancouver Canucks have had a marvellous season going wire to wire atop the Pacific — more folks will pick Edmonton to come out of the Pacific this spring than Vancouver.

But let’s face it: Picks, lessons, memories…. They are the pennies of playoff currency.

The true Benjamins will begin to be laid down Saturday night in Edmonton, where with 18 games remaining in the Oilers schedule, the Oilers host Colorado on Hockey Night In Canada, the first of three remaining meetings between these two clubs.

Eventually, a team has to stop talking about it and prove it belongs among the big boys, the way Tampa and Colorado did after several years of disappointment. For Edmonton, that starts now.

“These guys are as good as anyone in the league, a good to test (as to) where your team's at and where your game is at against one of the league's best,” McDavid said of the Avs.

Name a better place to be than in front of your TV — or at Rogers Place — Saturday night.

This game will feature four of the Top 8 point-getters in the National Hockey League this season, and the consensus two best players in the world today: leading scorer Nathan MacKinnon (42-73-115) v. McDavid (25-81-106) in third place.

It’s the best offence in the game, with Colorado’s 3.72 goals per game, versus the Oilers at No. 4 (3.55). The best team in the league since Remembrance Day (Edmonton), versus the third best. The NHL’s third-best power play (Oilers) versus the sixth best (Avs).

Sun’s out? Guns out.

“It's a good opportunity for us to get into rhythm and flow of playing in a situation where emotions are probably heightened a little bit, the game’s heightened a little bit,” began Darnell Nurse, who recalls well the 4-0 series spanking the Avs laid on Edmonton in the spring of 2022, en route to the Stanley Cup.

“We went into that series with lots of hope, and came out of it saying that we had a lot of a lot of work to do as a team. To get to a point where we could compete with teams like that on a nightly basis,” he said. “You look around the room now, all the highs and lows we've been through as a group...

“We have we have a belief against any team on any night now.”

Where does that belief come from? We asked Derek Ryan, the cerebral depth centreman who thinks the game better than most, that very question.

“Our roster is a lot better,” he began. “Our depth has gotten a lot better. Our defensive core has gotten a lot better. I think we play with more detail, and although the top guys carry a lot of our offensive play, we've gotten away from relying on them in key situations like D-zone faceoffs and penalty kill. Connor is not out there as much as he was back then.”

Today, the belief in Edmonton’s dressing room is, as one would expect, exponentially higher than it was when they walked into Colorado for a series that began with a wild, 8-6 Colorado Game 1 win.

“That series was the beginning of the foundation of confidence and faith,” Ryan said. “We've won so many games here over the past two seasons, that the faith is bigger now. We have confidence in our group.

“Even through the really rocky start that we had to the season, that faith has always been in this room. We just know we can win games — and win games against tough teams.”

Belief is everything, but it comes from looking around your own dressing room and seeing a team that can play with the Colorados and Vegas’s who were better than you these last two springs.

As we like to say, the players always know.

They know if their team is good enough, where its weak spots lie, and whether or not they’ve made up the necessary ground to take another run at the big boys.

Check all those boxes and you have the one intangible that so many teams seek, but so very few truly have.

You have belief.

“That belief is earned,” points out McDavid. “We've done a lot of really good things over the course of a couple of years, and we've earned that belief in our group and ourselves that we can play against anybody.”

And so we shall see.