There was a time when the Edmonton Oilers were a team that had forgotten how to lose.
Well, the St. Louis Blues just reminded them.
For the second time in three games, with Edmonton’s team record 16-game winning streak becoming a distant memory, the undisciplined Oilers were outplayed top to bottom and man for man by their opponent.
St. Louis thumped the Oilers by a 6-3 score, in a game where the Oilers gave the Blues eight trips to the power play. St. Louis scored on two of them, but the time spent shorthanded sewered the Oilers’ offensive game.
“It makes it really hard when you take that many penalties. It gets you out of a rhythm,” said chief penalty killer Derek Ryan. “Obviously our PK has been struggling a little bit too, so it’s hard when you keep putting us back out there again and again and again.”
Lose the special teams battle, lose the game. These days, the Oilers penalty killing unit just isn’t up to the lack of discipline the rest of the team showed Thursday in St. Louis.
Edmonton took seven consecutive minor penalties at one point — four of them to Vincent Desharnais, including an unsportsmanlike minor for complaining about a call — and the Blues power play kept Edmonton pinned. The Oilers have surrendered five power play goals in their last three games, as a unit that was impenetrable not long ago is collecting some dints.
“It’s been, I don’t know, three games maybe? That’s a pretty small sample size,” defended Ryan. “We’ve been really good for a long time, and maybe we haven’t had good bounces and haven’t been as structured as we were before, but it’s a confident group. We know we can kill penalties.”
Up at the top of the lineups, the Blues top unit of Robert Thomas, Pavel Buchnevich and Jordan Kyrou — which combined for seven points — won the day over Connor McDavid’s line with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman.
Hyman was absolutely robbed on two early power play chances by Jordan Binnington, a pair of saves that kept this game retrievable for the Blues, who trailed 2-1 at the first intermission.
“He played well, but that wasn’t the reason we lost the game,” Hyman said of Binnington. “Self-inflicted errors — things we can clean up.”
As a guy who does not kill penalties, Hyman played just 14:26. McDavid saw just 18:47 of ice time, his lowest since Jan. 2.
Why all the penalties?
“It’s just a symptom of not having a the puck enough, and then we’re defending too much,” Hyman said. “Then when you’re defending that much, you get tired and take penalties.”
“We were very frustrated with the calls against us,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, “and it puts us a difficult position to win the game. You’re behind — we’re needing goals — and we’re spending time killing penalties. As a team, we have to decide that no matter how much we disagree with a call — and there were a lot of calls that our team disagreed with — we put it aside and play hockey.”
McDavid was on the ice for eight of nine goals in the game, including the empty netter that sends the Oilers to Dallas hoping to right their ship in the home of the Central Division-leading Stars.
“We have to show up, just get back to the basics and keep things simple,” Hyman said. “Just making it easy on ourselves. Tonight we didn’t make it easy. We’re turning pucks over and then getting beat up the ice and we’re in our D zone too much.”
IN THE CREASE — With three assists, McDavid kept pace with Art Ross leader Nikita Kucherov, who also had a three-point night against Colorado … Corey Perry scored his first as an Oiler. As bad as the Connor Brown signing has been, Perry looks like he’ll help a great deal as playoff hockey approaches. “He brings a lot of intangibles to our dressing room, our bench, and then on the ice as well,” Ryan said. “He’s a leader and a spark plug. He can get us going when we’re not having a great night, and I thought he did a good job doing that.”
