CHICAGO — It’s cliché to blame a goaltender for every goal that gets scored.
Across the National Hockey League, the fan base whose winger scorers from 30 feet out lauds a great shot, while the fan base that was scored on brays a chorus of, “We need that save!”
In Edmonton, Leon Draisaitl scores 50 beauties a year, while poor Stuart Skinner — or backup Calvin Pickard — can’t let a one-timer in from below the hash marks without blame being cast his way.
But sometimes, the fans are right. Like during the first period of a determined 4-3 Oilers win Saturday at Chicago.
“I think it's safe to say the goalie was no good there for a while,” said Pickard, who dug out a win for Edmonton with a heck of a final few minutes, flashing a serpent-like pad to deny Ryan Donato with nine seconds left and Chicago enjoying a six-on-four advantage.
“I didn't like the way I started at all, (down) 2-0. I was a little bit dopey, and there's no excuse for that,” Pickard said. “The third one I can live with. But yeah, we played well, and the silver lining was, I kind of stuck with it and made a couple saves at the end. But I need to be better off the get go, for sure.”
To use an old Jim Matheson standard back in the Oilers’ Glory Days, this one was no Rembrandt, but more of a paint-by-numbers. Matty would trot that one out in the Edmonton Journal when the Oilers would struggle to pull two points out of New Jersey or Colorado, and we’ll recycle it today as Edmonton fell behind the NHL’s 32nd-place team 2-0 just 15 minutes in — after having given up a 3-0 lead the Thursday in Pittsburgh less than 10 minutes after puck drop.
After that start, they flew home with a 4-3 win, and three out of four on this road trip. They gutted this one out.
“Did we ever,” smiled Zach Hyman, who scored the game-winner on the power play after being reunited on a unit with Connor McDavid and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. “Our line was minus-2 before we blinked.”
Hey, sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes….
“We play 82 games,” reasoned Hyman. “We’re not going to win every game. You’ve got to be able to find a way to win, crawl out of a game, have different guys stepping up.
“You’ve got to find many ways to win. You’ve got to nip losing. You don’t want to lose two in a row. We’re on a good stretch.”
Edmonton hasn’t lost two games in a row in regulation since Nov. 4th and 6th. After 20 sleepy minutes here, you could hear the fat lady warming up somewhere in the cavernous United Center, as a Blackhawks team that had beaten the Oilers already this season had way more jump and far more urgency in the opening period.
But there are many elements in forging a winning culture, and one of those milestones comes when you have a team that doesn’t need to be told how or when to fix its problems. When you have a roster of players who just know, and a coach who can massage those changes out of his team with subtlety, not a series of Knute Rockne speeches.
“We know when we’re on our game and we know when we’re off our game,” said Adam Henrique, who tipped home the 3-2 goal that sparked the comeback. “There doesn’t have to be a big rah-rah speech in the room in between periods to know that we have to step up and get to our game.”
In a game billed as The Battle of the Connors, neither McDavid nor Bedard registered a point, as their parents shared a box at the United Centre, having met for the first time Saturday. Both Connors went minus-2 on the night.
What they did see was an Edmonton team that is miles ahead of the Blackhawks on their organizational curve. This is an Oilers team that hopes its three Stanley Cups are on the horizon, whereas Chicago’s are firmly in the rearview mirror.
Down 2-0, the Oilers put both hands on the wheel and left no doubt which team is contending and which is in the throes of a rebuild.
“Our puck play (got) better,” said Draisaitl. “We were passing the puck better, and when you value the puck, we have a lot of great players on our team. That's what separates us from a lot of teams. When we have clean puck movement, it makes us really, really fast and really tough to handle.”
There is no such thing as a must-win game in January for a team on a 106-point pace in the Pacific Division.
But after a loss in Pittsburgh, this was one of those games that a team should win, if it considers itself a genuine power.
“First of all, you never want to lose two in a row, get on this downward trend or this frustration,” said Draisaitl (two assists, plus-2), whose plus-26 rating is best in the NHL this morning. “They’re not all pretty, they're not all perfect, they’re not all Boston-type games (4-0 win).
"We had to find a way tonight, and we did."
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