EDMONTON — There is only one way this Edmonton Oilers team competes for a Stanley Cup this season, and it starts right at the top.
It’s Connor McDavid, and he knows it.
“The year hasn’t gone the way I would have loved it to, personally. But we’re not after personal success,” McDavid said last week. “I wish I was playing better. I wish I had played better all year.”
Simply put, if McDavid doesn’t find his game — his real, five-on-five defensively sound and offensively dynamic game — it’s lights out in Edmonton. There are simply too many passengers this season among the Oilers core for Leon Draisaitl to carry all by himself, and defensively, this team has no one to follow.
McDavid is minus-14 in his past eight games.
“We all want to be better versions of ourselves,” Zach Hyman said on Tuesday morning. “Because if all of us collectively can gear up a little bit individually, it’s going to make the team better.
“When your captain is saying that he wants more of himself, I think everybody can look at themselves in the mirror and say, ‘Hey, we can all give a little bit more.’”
If McDavid leads, as he always has, maybe this crew of struggling core players will follow. If he doesn’t, the way so many key players are playing this season, well, we can see next year from here.
Tuesday night the Anaheim Ducks walked into Rogers Place and beat the Edmonton Oilers for fun, 6-2. They outscored Edmonton 6-0 at even strength.
McDavid had a nice two-point night — a goal and an assist, both on the power play. At five-on-five McDavid was minus-2, while Draisaitl was a shambles, finishing with two power-play points and a big, fat minus-4.
The Oilers blueline was frighteningly soft, lost in their own zone and — as a five-man unit — Edmonton was too slow and aged to handle a quick Ducks team that’s not going to make the playoffs this season.
The goaltending? As usual, somewhere south of average.
“We’re a fragile team, and when things aren’t going well, we lose our game,” head coach Kris Knoblauch said. “Our start was exactly how we needed to play, and guys were ready. Then a little bit of adversity, and we were a shell of ourselves.”
How does this team turn back into the one picked to win a Stanley Cup this season? It all comes back, as everything does in Edmonton, to the best player in the world.
We’re not ‘calling McDavid out’ here. He doesn’t owe anybody anything around here.
It’s just Edmonton’s reality.
The Oilers have a good team, but he’s the great separator. If McDavid is great, the Oilers can be too.
But when he’s just OK, as he has been — by his standards — all season long, it seems like the team follows suit.
Because there simply isn’t enough underneath the two-headed monster here in Edmonton, and Knoblauch knows it.
“We’re not getting a whole lot of offence unless 97 or 29 are on the ice,” he lamented.
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Somehow, almost every single important player on this team is having a worse season this year than they had last year.
“For a lot of us, statistically, it’s not as good as it has been,” said Hyman, who squandered two net-front opportunities on Tuesday that just don’t seem to go in the way they did last year. “But at the same time, we’re all here for a collective goal. We’re all here to find our game, so that when we’re coming down the stretch that’s when we’re playing our best. That’s when it matters the most.”
We’re at the quarter pole. The loss to Anaheim was game No. 61 on Edmonton’s schedule.
Let’s just say that the Oilers have been saving their strength for another long run. Well, now it’s time to flip the switch.
“The focus is, we’ve got 20 games left,” Hyman said after Tuesday’s morning skate, hours before the debacle to follow. “Let’s individually find our games, collectively find our games, and push. Because we’re not that far off. We know that we can be one of the best teams in the league, and we’re very capable of it.”
Post-game, Nugent-Hopkins was more blunt:
“We know what we’re capable of, what we have in this room, and we know we can get back to it,” said the veteran assistant captain. “But this is crunch time, and you can’t just flip a switch. It’s not just going to happen because we say it’s going to happen.”
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McDavid was skating better on Tuesday, and handling the puck more. All of that and he didn’t have an even strength point.
Nugent-Hopkins, on pace for a sub-50 point season, has not been impactful for any meaningful stretch of games this year. Unless his centreman drags him into the fight, it doesn’t look like it will happen.
Hyman’s a different case. His success, to a large extent, depends on McDavid, who draws the defence and feeds Hyman for dirty goals down low. McDavid isn’t providing to his usual pedigree, and when he does Hyman’s finish has lacked.
Evan Bouchard’s game has been well chronicled, but what hasn’t been mentioned much is his partner — Mattias Ekholm — has not played up to his own standard this season. Ekholm hasn’t had time to babysit Bouchard, and the end result is that Edmonton’s top pair has been sub-par for most of the season, a malady we’re not sure McDavid can cure.
Connor Brown has one goal in his last 30 games. He’s a metaphor for a bottom-six that simply does… not… contribute… enough.
And then there’s the goaltending…
