EDMONTON — You can distrust the Situation Room all you want if you think there is some grand conspiracy through which the National Hockey League wants its best player and most explosive offensive team eliminated as soon as possible.
You can say the referees graded out somewhere between poor and brutal here in Game 3 on Friday — because that would be accurate.
The officials are not biased, just well below an acceptable level of competent. And if you judged that their unpredictability likely hurt the Edmonton Oilers a call or two more than it did the Los Angeles Kings in Game 3, I wouldn’t give you an argument.
Whine about the calls all you want, Oiler fans, in a game where the power plays were 5-4 in favour of the Kings.
But here’s why the Oilers are down 2-1 in this series, after a 3-2 overtime loss, the second time the Oilers have coughed up a power-play goal in OT in this series.
They are down because an Oilers team that averaged four goals per game all season can’t solve the Kings often enough at five-on-five to win these games. The Kings are hanging around, hanging around, and for the second time in three games, the Oilers left themselves at the mercy of the refs — and paid for it.
Edmonton trails this series because it has blown a lead in every game. Because, tied 2-2 after 40 minutes, the Oilers couldn’t find a hero from amongst their stable of scorers, while the Kings found theirs.
Yes, that might have been a high-stick by Gabe Vilardi in overtime. Yes, the Situation Room is a confusing place.
Yes, the refs were bad.
You know who else has been bad? (Or at least, unproductive?)
Zach Hyman. Kailer Yamamoto. Evander Kane. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. Even Mattias Ekholm is minus-2 in this series.
The Oilers got two Connor McDavid goals on the power play in Game 3, and nothing else from anybody else in this critical, series-tilting loss.
“It’s a tight-checking series,” began McDavid. “It’s the little breaks here and there, little calls here and there. We haven’t seemed to be getting any of the bounces. We had our looks, we had our chances, and they find a way to get a power play and score in overtime.”
He’s right about the bounces, and the calls. The Kings have earned those, and so it becomes a race against time, with Edmonton running out of time to turn the bounces in their favour by outworking the opponent — and stop gifting the Kings power plays.
Cry all you want about a high-stick deemed inconclusive after a lengthy look from the Situation Room in Toronto. It was Nugent-Hopkins who let Alex Iafallo get away in OT, and then broke Iafallo’s stick — a penalty that gets called every single time.
“He cuts across the middle like that, I try to kind of clamp down on his stick and … obviously it came down too hard,” said Nugent-Hopkins, who has just two power-play assists in this series – nothing at even strength. “I can’t really fault (the referee) for that. I mean, I come down too hard and break his stick. I’ve got to be in a better position to not put myself in that situation.”
Stuart Skinner has been fine in this series, but Joonas Korpisalo has been great. That’s a major part of this 2-1 deficit.
The Oilers have outshot and out-possessed the Kings, but also lead the entire playoffs in times shorthanded, averaging five per game.
The unsportsmanlike call on Leon Draisaitl during an Oilers goal celebration was, in my estimation, weaker than weak. But does Draisaitl need to put his stick anywhere near Drew Doughty’s shin pads after his team has just scored?
Take your goal, celebrate and skate to the bench.
“You don’t call a clear knee-on-knee, right in front of you. And then you call a slashing penalty,” said Draisaitl of that play. “Which is not smart on my part. I know that. Just don’t really know what the standard is right now.”
Nobody knew the standard in Game 3, and it ended on a high-sticking review in overtime that will be replayed in Edmonton like the Zapruder film.
Why did it come to that?
Because the Oilers didn’t get the job completed in a third period they dominated, leaving the door open for a sketchy call to perhaps cost them the game.
Sorry — when the league’s highest-scoring team can’t score an even-strength goal in 60-plus minutes, we’re not blaming the refs.
That’s a copout.
We’re looking at the guys whose job it is to find a way.
“We’re down 2-1 in the series,” said McDavid. “We’ve got to find a way to turn those chances, that territorial advantage, into results.”
It’s not going to be easy, and if you leave it up to the referees — or the Situation Room — to have your back, well, they won’t.
You’re a good team. Have your own back.
