EDMONTON — There are two convenient ways of looking at this all-Canadian matchup out West, and we’ll let you be the judge as to which way makes the most sense.
You could recall that the Canucks owned the Oilers back in October and November, beating them by scores of 8-1, 4-3 and 6-2. The Canucks were en route to a 12-3-1 start, as a team that was a pick ‘em just to make the playoffs began to show itself as a far more legitimate contender than most thought they would be.
Add a late-season 4-3 Canucks win at Edmonton — a game in which Connor McDavid did not play — and the takeaway here is that there are some teams that just have another club’s number, and the Canucks certainly have Edmonton’s number this season.
OK, now the alternative view:
That 8-1 Opening Night loss was 87 games ago, for the Oilers. A week shy of seven months ago on the calendar.
“Sooo long ago,” McDavid said on Saturday.
“It feels like years ago, to the start of the season,” added Mattias Ekholm. “I don’t even remember the games.”
In the time since Nov. 6, when the Canucks rattled off their third win over Edmonton in the season’s opening month, much has transpired. The Oilers fired a coach (Jay Woodcroft), hired another (Kris Knoblauch), and put together the best record in the National Hockey League starting the day after they left Vancouver for the final time this season.
They enter this Round 2 series as the most confident group in blue and orange we’ve seen since the ’80s, with a goaltender they believe in, special-teams units that were the class of the NHL’s opening round, and near perfect health.
To sum up viewpoint No. 2, not only is this Oilers team not that Oilers team, but we’re not sure this Canucks team is that Canucks team either.
You can adopt whichever of these narratives you wish, or even parts of both.
But the one thing I believe we can all agree on is this: Vancouver has not yet seen the Oilers’ best this season.
“No, I think we’re playing our best now,” Zach Hyman said. “L.A. obviously did, and now we get Vancouver. Should be good.”
Even the Oilers will admit, their early season run-ins with the Canucks left a dent they look forward to pounding out.
“Do we have something to prove?” asked Ekholm. “Yeah, absolutely. They beat us every single time.”
If there is a difference between these teams today, it is that Edmonton faced and defeated its early season adversity months ago. That 2-9-1 start did not kill them, and as the old line goes, it did indeed make them stronger.
Meanwhile, despite having muscled through Nashville in Round 1, we’re not sure Vancouver has come out on the other side of their adversity quite yet, with No. 1 goalie Thatcher Demko still injured, and Elias Pettersson limping into Round 2 with zero goals and just three assists against Nashville.
He had just eight shots on goal over six games, as the sixth highest scoring team in the regular season (3.40 goals per game) averaged just two goals per game versus the Preds.
“Adversity helps throughout the year, (and) we experienced it really early,” Hyman said. “We were at the point where the season was almost on the line, and we were less than 15 games in, which is unusual.
“It helps in the sense that you have to play with a sense of urgency throughout the year. You learn to be comfortable in pressure situations, (when) everybody’s counted you out, in a way. We have a great sense of self belief and confidence in the locker room, and I think that all comes from what you do throughout the season — as you build your team.
“That adversity helped us. Helped build who we are.”
Of course, McDavid has his own spin on what the regular season series means come playoff time.
“Winnipeg beat up on Colorado all year long (Avs were 0-3, outscored 17-4 before Colorado won a five-game series in the first round). It’s different hockey in the playoffs.”
What history has taught us is that playoff hockey is about the here and now. That what the Canucks accomplished in October and November is no more or less meaningless than what the Oilers accomplished in their five-game win over Los Angeles.
It’s about the now, and it always has been.
Two teams that finished five points and one win apart over an 82-game season are both quite capable of beating each other, and now it becomes about which players impose their game upon their opponent, and which players allow that will to be forced upon them.
Playoff experience? We know that helps, and the Oilers have nearly all of it in this series.
But even that simply represents something you did a long time ago.
So buckle up, folks.
This is a series between one team that has paid considerable dues, one that thinks this is their time. And another that just got to the party, but sees no reason why it would have to wait in line behind a team it handled all season long.
Canucks, Oilers.
I’ll take Edmonton in six.
