Experienced Sharks give Oilers a rude welcome to playoff hockey

Melker Karlsson scored the winning goal in overtime and the San Jose Sharks defeated the Edmonton Oilers in Game 1.

EDMONTON — Wait… What?

This wasn’t supposed to be a coronation?

The question wasn’t “Would the Edmonton Oilers win?” It was, “How many games would it take the San Jose Sharks to lose?”

Welcome to playoff hockey, Edmonton. You wait 11 years for it, and in a quick three hours it breaks your heart.

“They had the puck all night,” said Connor McDavid, in a matter-of-fact assessment of his team’s 3-2 overtime loss in Game 1 of Edmonton’s Round 1 series with San Jose. “When you don’t have the puck you’re not going to get many shots on goal. They did a good job.”

Does a 44-19 shots advantage for the road team in Game 1 constitute “a good job?” You bet it does.

Sometimes shots on goal is a deceiving stat. But when the period totals are 10-10 in the first, 10-4 in the second, 18-3 in the third and 6-2 in OT — the latter three in favour of the Sharks — the shot clock tells you which team dominated in the first playoff game played in Edmonton since the 2006 Stanley Cup Final.

Edmonton led 2-0 after 20 minutes on a fluky carom and a powerplay goal, then watched the Sharks absolutely take the game away from them (with some help from six Oilers minor penalties). Eventually, Melker Karlsson would take a wide pass from Joe Pavelski and rip a wrist shot far side on Cam Talbot, settling this one at the 3:22 mark of the first overtime.

The better team on the night won Game 1. Of that there is absolutely no doubt.

“They were able to grab the game and we were unable to grab it back,” said Todd McLellan, the Oilers coach who might have had an edge against the team he coached for seven seasons, had his charges been able to deliver on that edge against an experienced Sharks team that lost the Cup Final to Pittsburgh a year ago.

“We didn’t come out of our end very well,” began McLellan. “We didn’t play with a lot of pace and I think that was a product of their checking, their tenacity. That’s playoff hockey — it’s going to get tighter, get harder. And the other thing I thought they did well, they were five or seven seconds ahead of us with every change, so they caught us tired a lot of times and took advantage of us, hemmed us in.”

So now, we get to the meat in this sandwich.

For the past few days we have tried to put into prose the advantage the Sharks held over Edmonton, derived from the fact that San Jose had played 110 playoff games since the Oilers last dropped a puck in the post-season.

The playoffs are all about swings in momentum. Grabbing a game, having it taken away, and getting back again. Edmonton lost the momentum and never saw it again.

So perhaps, in that last McLellan quote, he defined the advantage that playoff experience provides.

“I guess I probably did, when you think about it,” the coach said.

“We were confident we could go out and turn things around (after the first period),” said Logan Couture, who played with a full cage to protect a suspected fractured jaw, while Joe Thornton (knee) did not dress. “We forechecked them hard and they got caught on some long shifts. From the second period on, we had control of that game. It was just a matter of time before the puck was going to go in.”

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Lessons? There were a plenty on this night for the upstart Oilers. They’d beaten the Sharks twice in the past two weeks, but had never seen them at this level before.

“I don’t know whether they raised their game or our game fell off,” McDavid said. “It’s tough to say. I thought maybe we got a little comfortable, which can’t happen.”

Comfortable? That would be a problem, considering this Oilers team has nothing more than a nice regular season under its belt.

They say a series doesn’t start until the road team wins one.

That would mean then this series is well underway.

Or, to put it another way, school is in session.

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