How can Oilers get over the hump after another Stanley Cup setback?

EDMONTON — The Edmonton Oilers have become like an Olympic sprinter who always makes the 100-metre final, but comes up a tenth of a second short of a gold medal.

They are, in a way, Scott Norwood. Good enough to get you to the Super Bowl-winning field goal shot, but wide right when it counts.

Where does a hockey team that scores 340 goals in a regular season and playoffs find the three or four more goals — for or against — that separate them from greatness, as a fourth consecutive season ends with a loss to the Stanley Cup champ?

How, in another season of more than 100 games played and 62 games won, do you build one or two more wins into your roster? But not in November — they have to come in June.

I heard someone ask if the Oilers need an identity change after their six-game loss to the Florida Panthers, and I thought, “Define how one changes a four-round identity? Do you go out in Round 1?”

Would you rather be Dallas, with a three-round identity? Or Toronto, and play one or two rounds a season?

Do you look at an Oilers team that rolled over Western powerhouses Vegas and Dallas in five games each, and say, “We have to find a way to be better than that?”

You’re simply not going to get better than that inside your conference, and it would be arrogant to think that you could.

No, the goal in Edmonton is to beat a specific team with a specific style in a specific round, assuming that — against all odds — you both end up at the same dance for a third consecutive year.

The Oilers’ margin of improvement is that two per cent. It just happens to be the most important two per cent in their world.

“Their forecheck was great, they tilted the rink,” Connor McDavid, who almost never swears in front of a camera, said post-loss. “They were able to stay on top of us all over the place and we were never really able to generate any momentum up the ice.

“We kept trying the same (bleeping) thing, over and over again, banging our heads against the wall.”

Let’s start with the notion that Edmonton was outcoached. It’s a term I never use, and here is why:

Between head coach Kris Knoblauch and assistants Glen Gulutzan, Mark Stuart and Paul Coffey, there are decades of pro hockey experience. Inside that are connections with 100 different coaches, all of whom are watching their friend’s or former player’s team contest a Stanley Cup.

One hundred pairs of coaching eyes, 100 coaching brains, breaking down the games in real time.

Those eyes belong to people like Scotty Bowman, maybe a Ken Hitchcock or a Rick Bowness. A Joel Quenneville. A Claude Julien.

Current NHL coaches are watching, a phone call away for an opinion on what they might try.

It’s never three coaches, or one staff at a time like this.

So if we can agree that the Oilers likely knew how to deal with Florida’s pressing game, yet failed to succeed, then it comes down to personnel. To roster construction.

Perhaps the Panthers' knack for bringing the game to their preferred battleground — the boards, the blue-lines, the front of your net — tilted the series. Because Edmonton wants to play a skating, puck-moving game that is designed to its strengths.

That’s why it’s a copy-cat league, right? Teams want to beat Florida, so teams try to be Florida.

But can McDavid and Leon Draisaitl ever try to play the game the way Sam Bennett and Matt Tkachuk do? Does it make sense for them even to try?

Evan Bouchard has grown into that genuine No. 1 defenceman the Oilers have lacked for years. But he’s Evan Bouchard, and he’ll never play the game the way Aaron Ekblad plays.

For 95 per cent of the season, I’ll take Bouchard. But for the five per cent that really counts, Ekblad was the better player.

Then there’s the most important position of all, where Stuart Skinner came up second best to no-doubt Hall of Famer Sergei Bobrovsky — again.

Skinner was better this spring than Jake Oettinger and Adin Hill. He (and many others) was better than Hart and Vezina winner Connor Hellebuyck — not all season long, but when the games truly mattered.

But if we agree that GM Stan Bowman will and should upgrade at goal — and I do — let’s explore how.

If you could engineer a trade for one of the elites in hockey, you do it.

But can you get an Igor Shesterkin, an Ilya Sorokin, an Andrei Vasilevskiy or a Juuse Saros? The Jets aren’t moving Hellebuyck, nor is Florida trading Bob or Minny trading away Filip Gustavsson. Thatcher Demko can be had but his health can’t be trusted. John Gibson is simply hurt too often these days.

So we’d keep Skinner, a 26-year-old youngster who makes just $2.6 million, and add a Scott Wedgewood, Darcy Kuemper-level guy — whomever that name turns out to be. Someone to share the net with Skinner, and let the two push each other for starts.

Regrettably, that would take Calvin Pickard out of your room. But the roster is finite, and improvement means keeping the best goalie you have and finding another who is better.

But we’d ask you: If the goalies in this Stanley Cup Final swapped jerseys, does Bobrovsky win the 6-1 and 5-1 games that Skinner lost? Does the Russian win a series as tilted as this one, that the Edmonton kid couldn’t rescue for his overmatched team?

I say, no chance.

So the plan for finding that extra win or two, that tenth of a second on the track, maybe it’s simply a two-part strategy.

One, make your team just a little bit better.

And two, hope like hell that somebody knocks the Panthers out in the East.