On the night where his top line combined for six goals in a 6-3 win over Nashville, Edmonton Oilers head coach Jay Woodcroft had this subdued assessment of his No. 1 unit:
“They paced us tonight.”
Paced them?
They carried the Edmonton Oilers over the Nashville Predators, a club that will see Connor McDavid, Zach Hyman and Leon Draisaitl in their nightmares tonight, so dominant was the Oilers’ top line on the occasion of Edmonton’s eighth straight win over the Predators — a 6-3 victory.
How badly do these Oilers own the Preds? Let us count the ways:
• Draisaitl — often referred to as the Mayor of Nashville — had 2-3-5 Tuesday, and now has collected 30 points in his last 11 games versus Nashville.
• McDavid (1-3-4) has 24 points in his last 10 games versus Nashville.
• Together, that’s 54 points in their last 11 versus the Predators, and eight straight wins for Edmonton.
Then there’s Zach Hyman, the right winger on that line who had his first career hat trick on Tuesday. He was like a badger with a toothache, battling relentlessly for every puck and one-handing the hat trick goal into an empty net after winning a race with elite defenceman Roman Josi.
That kind of tenacity next to the skill of the NHL’s top two scorers makes for some kind of a line.
“I can’t explain it,” Woodcroft said of the success vs the Preds. “Offensively, they were they were feeling it.”
This one began with a 55-foot Cody Glass wrister that caromed off of Cody Ceci’s leg and through Jack Campbell’s legs. The struggling Oilers goalie hadn’t started a game in 13 days and that was his first shot — a bleeder that barely even had enough steam to touch the back of the net.
“I thought everybody moved on and it ended up being a real nice evening,” said Campbell after a 29-save performance, one in which he made some key saves but would have kicked himself had he not walked away with the ‘W’ after a six-goal performance by his club. “There was still 59 more minutes or whatever it was to go, and you’ve just got to keep going. So that’s what we all did.”
For most of the evening, Campbell had a pretty good vantage point to watch the NHL’s most powerful offensive duo. The NHL’s two leading scorers fittingly put on a show in Music City, going two-for-two on the powerplay and along with Hyman, combining for 16 of Edmonton’s 36 shots on goal.
It’s uncanny what Draisaitl does to these Preds. They just can’t handle what he brings to the table, somehow.
The Preds are just his team, and Nashville is clearly his kind of town.
“Maybe. It just seems to seem to go my way,” shrugged Draisaitl, who sits second in the NHL with 51 points and leads the league with 13 powerplay goals. “There are other teams that sometimes you struggle against a little bit. Every player has their team.”
Few have one like Draisaitl has the Preds, however.
Meanwhile, McDavid now has 59 points through 30 games this season, an incredible run that had him chasing two of the game’s greats. Since the 1995-96 season, only two players have had more points through the first 30 games of a season, and they are Mario Lemieux (71) and Jaromir Jagr (64).
He’s got 26 goals now and is running a 10-game points streak (9-11-20). McDavid leads the NHL in goals, assists and points, but settled down in the third period to ice the game, with the only goal coming on Hyman’s dogged empty-netter.
The win ends the Oilers’ third 10-game segment at 7-3, identical to their opening 10 games this season. In between they went 3-7, and today they’re two points out of second place in the Pacific with some key injured players yet to return.
“Our team has learned some lessons along the way,” began Woodcroft, “and tonight’s third period was another mature, professional third period where we locked it down. We gave up a few chances, but we didn’t break and we were able to get the empty net goal to make it 6-3.
“Our team is taking steps forward in learning how to check to win. How, when you have a night where you score four or five, that should be enough to win if you check the right way.”
•••
Anaheim general manager Pat Verbeek followed Edmonton through Minnesota and Nashville, and one of the players he would have been having a look at is Jesse Puljujarvi. Well, here’s what Verbeek saw in two games: 21:03 of ice time, one shot on goal, two hits and three missed nets and a blocked shot.
Puljujarvi had a couple of better shifts on the top line late in the Preds game, but clearly, $3 million doesn’t buy what it used to.
