Oilers general manager Ken Holland said on Edmonton radio station 630 CHED that Draisaitl, Kane and Nugent-Hopkins would play Wednesday. I thought some of the people who might not be in the everyday lineup provided a little bit of a boost and a little energy… We’re well-prepared heading into Game 1.” “I thought we had a really good practice today. Woodcroft was vague when it came to accounting for their absences and talked about the players who were there, rather than addressing the big names who were away. Oilers 55-goal man Leon Draisaitl, who is labouring through a lower-body injury suffered in a Game 6 scrum in L.A., was not on the ice for practice Tuesday.Īlso absent were forwards Evander Kane and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. “As you guys can see, the hockey is completely different than it was in the regular season. “I don’t read too much into the regular season, to be honest,” Kassian said. To illustrate Hyman's point, the Oilers swept the Winnipeg Jets over the course of the regular season in 2020-21, only to be swept by the Jets in the first round of the playoffs. It’s tighter, it’s harder to play, there’s more emotion.” “It’s different than the regular season, it doesn’t matter what happened in the regular season or what the record was… the playoffs are a different game. He said the Oilers will need to “play heavy.” Hyman said the Oilers would need to get pucks deep, get into the corners and work the cycle despite the physicality the Flames will bring to the games. When we got caught and were turning the puck over in the neutral zone, that’s when we were having trouble.” “We understood where we had the most success. In fact, playing against a Kings team that liked to clog up the neutral zone should prepare the Oilers well for the Flames' big defensive unit. Hyman suggested several times during his time at the podium that this series, in contrast, would be tight-checking and a battle of wills. The 9-5 score from March 26 was a throwback to the glory days of the Battle of Alberta of the 1980s and early 1990s, when the likes of Gretzky, Kurri, Messier, McDonald, Fleury and MacInnis used to fill the scoresheets. I think we showed perseverance all year if we had a bad game, we came back with an even stronger effort.” "We got embarrassed, and we bounced back. “Whenever you get spanked, no matter who it’s against, you want to have a bounce-back game," he said. Winger Zack Kassian, who had a goal and an assist in the first round, admitted that there were some red faces in Oilers jerseys after the nine-goal bonanza at the Saddledome. But I think they helped us grow as a team, to face adversity.”
And, later on in the year, they caught us a couple of times. “We were a different team earlier on in the year.
Most embarrassing moments in hockey series#
“We played them at different times in the season, and our season has been a little different than most years,” said Oilers winger Zach Hyman, who scored twice and added a couple of helpers in the series win over Los Angeles. The Flames and Oilers split the four-game regular-season series, but Calgary won both games on Saddledome ice, where the two teams will start Wednesday. “For us, it was an opportunity to focus our group on the type of game we needed to play in order to have some success. “It allowed the coaching staff to use it as a learning moment for our group,” said Oilers coach Jay Woodcroft. Their rivals might have actually done the Oilers a favour. The Calgary blowout was a look-in-the-mirror moment. Yet the Oilers went on a 13-2-1 tear after that game to close the regular season, and then rallied to beat the Kings in seven games in the first round of the playoffs. The Calgary Flames pumped nine goals past the Oilers, in what could have been Edmonton’s most embarrassing outing of the season, when the teams last met on March 26.
EDMONTON - It was not the Edmonton Oilers’ finest hour, but a big loss to their Battle of Alberta archrivals might have been instrumental to their playoff push.
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