By wasting Grade-A chances, Oilers squander easy opportunity for two points

KANATA, Ont. — By the time Tim Stutzle’s shot was banking off of Mikko Koskinen’s bicep and into the top corner of the Oilers’ goal to become an overtime winner, Edmonton could very plausibly have been boarding their bus for the airport.

They could have had five goals on the night. Maybe six.

Most nights, they would have scored at least four, rendering any talk of overtime moot.

Edmonton was anything but great on a Monday night in the Nation’s Capital, and got outworked at times by the young, hustling and sometimes sloppy Sens. But you needed two hands to count the times an Edmonton player found himself in alone on Ottawa goalie Matt Murray — and all the right guys too.

Jesse Puljujarvi moments into the game. Connor McDavid more than once. Leon Draisaitl, a 31-goal scorer who could have left here at 33 or 34, he had so many quality looks. The industrious Zach Hyman, who worked his way to a couple of Grade A chances.

“So that’s hockey. Goalies stand on their head,” said Derek Ryan, who made a lovely play to set up Darnell Nurse’s tying goal. “I think we did some good things, created some good opportunities, but we need to do more creating traffic. I think he saw a lot of pucks. There wasn’t a lot of bodies in front of him.”

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Ryan wasn’t speaking of the five or six breaks where an Oiler found himself in alone on Murray, with only McDavid managing to best the Sens netminder with a sneaky low slapper that squeezed under Murray’s pad. But he could have been talking about an Oilers power play that was disjointed and executed far too much out on the perimeter, a unit that could have won this game by itself but instead went 0-for-3.

“It doesn’t look like we’re shooting enough, for starters,” said head coach Dave Tippett. “And when we do shoot we miss the net a lot.”

And so passed a night where the Oilers walk out of Ottawa with a single point, which is one more valid point than the Freedom Rally made during its visit to Ottawa this past weekend.

It seems a tad wasteful, considering the Sens are a Bottom 4 team in the NHL standings and were missing a host of important players. It wouldn’t have taken much to secure the second point in regulation, but give Murray credit. He was better on this night than Edmonton’s shooters.

“In this league the first one to three usually can win,” reasoned Tippett. “We didn’t get to three. They did.”

Tippett stuck with his four-line rotation well into the night, then went to work with the blender as the game wore on, Ottawa in front 2-1. He moved Ryan up and got a dandy assist out of him. Only one forward played less than 10 minutes — Devin Shore, at 7:54.

“There are always little parts of your game you want to work on that have to be better,” said Tippett. “There are players that can play a little better, things that you can work on our special teams. We were a minus one on special teams tonight.

“We like our team. I think we’ve got a good team. It’s a game I think was a winnable game if we could have capitalized on some chances. We didn’t, so we move on.”

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The only concern here would be how an understaffed, inferior hockey team outworked the Oilers for periods of this game. This was a prime example where the hockey Gods rewarded work over skill, and gave the Sens the game on Stutzle’s lovely overtime snipe.

After a scrap with Oilers defenceman William Lagesson, Stutzle becomes the first player in Sens history with a fight and an OT goal in the same game.

“I don’t know if we played well enough through 60 minutes to deserve a win,” admitted Ryan.

He’s right.

“I think we could have probably found another step up in our effort. Especially in the middle of that game,” agreed Nurse. “Matt made some great saves on the other end, and in times where we probably could have found a way to get some momentum, he made some big stops.

“He’s out there to do a job too, and he did his job well tonight. But I think we did have a lot chances and you want to you want to get both points in those situations.”

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