With 10 games to be played before playoffs, the Edmonton Oilers are, as Churchill said of Russia, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
Not enough toughness. Not enough supporting offence. Average goaltending. An inconsistent defensive posture, giving up four or five goals on a nightly basis.
But there are excuses.
No Leon Draisaitl, no Connor McDavid, no Stuart Skinner. Mattias Ekholm is nursing an injury that has left him a shadow of himself, their best defender playing like anything but in far too many games this season.
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Big deadline acquisition Trent Frederic hasn’t even skated with the team yet. Who knows when or if he puts on an Oilers jersey for the first time, but if general manager Stan Bowman can’t sign Frederic this summer, this trade has the potential to be as disastrous as the decision to let Dylan Holloway walk last summer.
On Thursday the Seattle Kraken beat Edmonton for fun. It was not close, it was not overly competitive, nor was it any fun for an Oilers fan to watch.
The final score was 6-1, but the Kraken turned out the lights with a five-goal middle period.
“We just stopped working, made too many mistakes, and they capitalized on a bunch of them,” said Zach Hyman. “If we’re not working, especially with the guys (they have) out of the lineup, we don’t have a chance. So we just let our game slip a little bit there, and then they took advantage.”
The Kraken sifted six goals past poor Calvin Pickard in the second period alone, with one coming back on an offside challenge. It was the worst period of the Oilers’ season, and Bakersfield call-up Olivier Rodrigue was the only beneficiary, getting the first 20 minutes of his NHL career with some mop-up duty in Period 3.
“The efforts for the last few games has been really good,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, who can’t be enjoying life without No. 97 and 29 very much. “You know, some of the games maybe could have went other ways, but tonight we definitely didn’t deserve to win. Hopefully that’s just a one-off.”
Sure, it’s a challenge playing on a back-to-back without your top two players and Ekholm, who was held out for “maintenance,” according to Knoblauch. But this shellacking went beyond being a little worn down or understaffed, thoroughly outplayed by a non-playoff team and folding up in a five-goal second period.
The debacle came one night after the Dallas Stars ran Edmonton’s goalies as often and as violently as they pleased, with exactly zero repercussions from an Oilers team that doesn’t even do the basic “stick up for each other” thing well enough these days. Skinner was said by Knoblauch to be “day-to-day” prior to the Seattle game, but as the playoffs approach the only thing trickier than gauging injury reports is the spring weather in Edmonton, where as much as six inches of snow fell on Thursday.
So the starter, Skinner, is listed as day-to-day and the backup is coming off of a six-goals-in-40-minutes outing, as the hungry Calgary Flames await Edmonton for a Hockey Night in Canada tilt Saturday night in Edmonton. Yikes.
“It’s an easy one to get up for,” the ever-positive Hyman said. “We haven’t played those guys in a while, and they’re in the hunt for a spot, so it’ll be good game.”
Seattle had lost nine straight to the Oilers — the Kraken hadn’t beaten Edmonton since January of 2023 — so they were due for a night against their divisional rivals.
Hyman scored the Oilers only goal, a meaningless tally that made the score 5-1. Rodrigue finished the game with seven saves and one goal allowed in 20 minutes, a nice debut for a 24-year-old who was drafted by Edmonton in 2018 but hasn’t found the kind of traction within the organization that he’d have hoped to have at this point.
“He responded well,” Knoblauch said. “A lot of big saves. We’re happy for him to have that period that he did.”
