EDMONTON — The Edmonton Oilers are still (cough, cough) sick. Wildly entertaining on Tuesday night, sure.
But not well. Not well at all.
Half of their Top 6 — Zach Hyman, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Viktor Arvidsson — hasn’t scored a goal through seven games, a pedestrian 2-4-1 record that includes a wasteful 1-3-1 mark on home ice.
Leon Draisaitl’s game is meh, and we’ll say that Jeff Skinner has been better than most, his two goals this season looking like Brett Hull material on this ice-cold roster.
Connor McDavid scored both goals in a 3-2 overtime loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on Tuesday, a game that would have been a regulation win had anybody else found the spark to light the lamp behind the stellar Frederik Anderson.
The captain showed up. The same can’t be said for some others.
Evan Bouchard’s offence has been better than his defence thus far, and you can read that however you’d like. He has two points.
The power play is wandering about in the dark, like Joe Biden building a midnight snack.
The penalty-killing unit? Brought to you by the City of Edmonton light rail transit department.
It’ll get done eventually…
In the end, a heroic game by goalie Stu Skinner was wasted by a roster that simply hasn’t started on time again this season, and looks nowhere close to breaking out of whatever has a boa constrictor-like grip on its collective scoring skills.
“We had an opportunity to win tonight and we didn’t,” said a sombre, impatient McDavid. “We gave ourselves a chance to win in Dallas, we didn’t (win). If you give yourself a chance in games, you are going to win more than you lose — if you are playing the way that we know we can play.
“We just haven’t seen it enough.”
When this roster was constructed, 30 goals was/is expected from Hyman. Nugent-Hopkins and Arvidsson should combine for 45, give or take..
That’s 75 goals, and through seven games that trio hasn’t scored even once.
Fun fact: Hyman is the first player in NHL history to be a 50-plus goal scorer in one season and then be held without a point in his first six games the following season. Make it seven, as Hyman had a chance to make the game 3-1 on a lovely McDavid feed — an identical play to about 18 of his goals last season — but was thwarted.
This morning, Hyman wakes up with 17 shots on goal and zero points.
Despite it all, Skinner afforded the Oilers a 2-0 lead after 40 minutes which they promptly blew.
“We were probably lucky to be up 2-0,” said a realistic Mattias Janmark. “Stu made some great saves, but anytime you go into the third up 2-0, you want to come away with a win.
“Not all was bad, but definitely it felt like we were we should have played better.”
The funny thing is, the Oilers got all the breaks against Carolina.
Two of Edmonton’s four power plays came on horrendous calls against Carolina. And as fabulous as Skinner played, the Hurricanes missed at least three open-net chances that NHLers bury at about an 80 per-cent success rate.
The Oilers got all the luck, unbelievable goaltending, and still squandered a point.
The chemistry on the Draisaitl-Skinner-Arvidsson line? It’s well below the periodic table.
Kris Knoblauch went back to it again Tuesday, and is likely to move away again from it Friday against Pittsburgh.
Jeff Skinner looks like he’ll find a way to help here. But Arvidsson? He’s got miles to go to get to decent in his new uniform.
“I can’t put my finger on why exactly it hasn’t worked out,” Knoblauch said of the unit. “You look at their scoring chances and what they’re generating, most games it’s positive. You’d think there would be more production with those players, where they would outscore the opposition on a regular basis.
“But right now I don’t have an answer.”
The Oilers are 2-4-1, which looks like it should end up being better than last year’s 2-9-1 — barring a five-game skid. But the level of team play is poor, the lack of team speed alarming at times.
And to make matters worse, Ryan McLeod has four goals in Buffalo, while Phil Broberg (1-5-6) is tearing it up in St. Louis.
Here in Oil country, a three-goal night is a gusher.
“We had some of our goal scorers getting some really nice looks and opportunities,” mused big defenceman Mattias Ekholm. “On another night, maybe we score one or two there and put the game to bed. But obviously that didn’t happen.
“Right now it’s just a matter of finding wins, and we can’t really do that right now. So it’s back to the drawing board a little bit.”
You wonder why it has to be this hard, why the hole has to get so deep again this season, tied for 27th in the National Hockey League?
The power play is ranked 29th, the penalty kill dead last at 32nd.
Yeah, sure. The Oilers proved they could climb out of the hole a year ago.
Does that mean it has to become an annual event?