Oilers learning to win the hard way with newfound defensive prowess

LOS ANGELES — It was, as Devon Levi so eloquently stated, “a great bad game.”

The Edmonton Oilers took a 3-0 lead into the first intermission, then used their newfound defensive prowess to turn the final 40 minutes into garbage time in a 4-1 win over the Los Angeles Kings. The win capped a perfect three-game California swing, and the 5-0-1 Oilers remain the National Hockey League’s only team without a regulation loss this season.

“Honestly, it's pretty impressive how we're able to score ballistically, and also play a really solid defensive game,” said Oilers goalie Devon Levi, who made a career-high 39 saves, most of the casual variety. “I know the message that Babs sent is that we have better. I mean, if that's our bad game, that's a great game.

“That's a great bad game.”

The Kings outshot Edmonton 29-10 over the final two periods, and 40-17 on the game. But somehow L.A. never really threatened the Oilers’ fifth straight regulation win in this young season, despite long stretches of possession.

“I thought they had good chances. But they didn't have Grade A's, two-on-ones,” said head coach Mike Babcock. “I didn't think at any time we were fantastic tonight, but McDavid and the big boys were great. The goalie was fantastic. We just swept three games on the road and 4-0 on the road, so life's good.”

There is definitely something happening here, to a team that has never really had a hard, defensive spine in its regular-season arsenal.

An early 3-0 lead like this always seemed to devolve into a comeback — or the genuine threat of one — for the run ‘n’ gun Oilers of yore. But on a Tuesday night in Los Angeles, they looked like they could have held the Kings off for another 20 minutes, if they’d been asked to.

Connor McDavid celebrated his 800th NHL game with his 33rd career three-point period, scoring on a breakaway and adding two primary assists in Period 1. He assisted on Vasily Podkolzin’s second goal, and empty netter, for a four-point evening, as McDavid torched the Kings in this building for the umpteenth time in his career.

We’ve seen that before, of that there is no doubt.

What we haven’t seen is an Oilers team with this kind of defensive backbone at this stage of the season. A backbone, ironically, that might just remind of those hardened 2012 and 2014 Stanley Cup champion Kings — after a few more months of drilling down on Babcock’s systems.

From the press box we’ve seen a team that defends hard and takes time and space away much more quickly than it ever has before. What does McDavid see from ice level?

“I see a team that's upbeat. I see a team that's energetic,” said the early-season Art Ross leader, with 17 points in six games. “It's got speed. It's aggressive. Wins a lot of puck battles. Those are all great things, and if you do those things night after night, you're going to put together some wins.”

We’ve watched this team win the firewagon, 5-4 games ever since McDavid was a rookie. But the mission this season is to learn how to win the hard way during the regular season, so that it is ingrained come playoff time.

So far we’re seeing much evidence to the positive.

“We're comfortable in a lot of different situations,” McDavid said. “We've won games 9-7. We've come back in games and gotten points. Saturday was a bit of a low event game (3-1 win at San Jose), and we're comfortable in that too.

“This team's building its identity, building its structure. We're still trying to figure things out as we go, and I think we're only going to get better and better.”

It’s a different look than he’s ever seen here, at this point in a season.

“Certainly,” nodded McDavid.

On this night Evan Bouchard calmly collected a pair of second assists to run his totals to 6-8-14 on the season. Perhaps more impressively, Bouchard has been on the ice for 17 even-strength goals for this season, and just two against.

We’re not sure he’s made a mistake yet, so close-to-perfect has his game become.

Podkolzin hit the seven-goal plateau in just his sixth game, on a line with McDavid and Leon Draisaitl (1-1-2), and it strikes us that McDavid and Draisaitl have played side by side all season long. Most times, they’d have been taken apart by now.

“When we get Nuge, Hymes and Savoie back, maybe that's different,” Babcock said of the injured Ryan Nugent-Hopkins,, Matt Savoie and Zach Hyman, who we expect to return on Thursday versus Utah. “Maybe on a night where you're not playing great, maybe we can move something around. Right now, there's not a lot of moves.”

A coach is never happy, it just comes with the vocation.

But for a guy installing a new system, with an entire second line on the Injured List and a handful of new players coming out of an abbreviated pre-season, Babcock won’t complain about a .917 start. Or the fact that his team is picking up his systems fairly well.

“I didn't love this tonight by any means,” he said. “But our big boys were great, our back end was really solid, and I thought our goaltender was good. I didn't think our two, three, and four lines were as good as they have been, for whatever reason. But we're in a good spot for the injuries we have.

“We're going to start getting some players back, and we're going to get way deeper and way harder to play against.”

For the Oilers, “hard to play against” used to mean 97, 29 and crew sifting seven past your netminder.

It’s starting to mean something else in Edmonton now, and that could be seismic.