Sunday Scaries: Tough start for the Oilers, around the NHL, and a week two preview

An 8-1 loss to kick off the season, hey…

I predicted a 2-0 start to the season, but I wasn’t expecting it to be for the Vancouver Canucks.

A team with a fiery offence getting lit up in an 8-1 blowout.

In their home opener against the Canucks, the Oilers outshot their opponents 40-16 and still managed to fall 4-3 anyway. Stuart Skinner only came up with 12 saves on the night, and Casey DeSmith could shut the door and keep 37 pucks out of the back of his net. After poor performances by both goaltenders on opening night and their home opener, it is hard to say who the Oilers will look to in their game against Nashville on Tuesday. Do you give Stu another chance? Back to Soup?

Overall, most of our team has played poorly, so we can’t pin these losses on the goaltenders alone, but everyone knows they both need to be better. In game two against the Canucks, Nuge gets a pass because he had himself a night, scoring a goal and assisting on the other two.

Even though it’s way too early to overreact, the Oilers are slowly digging themselves a hole, and at some point, they’re going to need to claw back out of it.

Again, I fully understand that this is only two games and this is 0.024% of the season, but it’s hard to get ahead when you’re starting from behind, and it only gets harder the longer this goes.

There are many teams in the opposite position of the Oilers, and that is, undefeated.

If I had to predict a team that was going to go undefeated and not pick the Oilers, I would have chosen the New Jersey Devils. Instead, the Devils lost in a shootout to the Arizona Coyotes of all teams.

But the remaining teams that are undefeated are:

Some of these teams are obviously frauds — I’m looking at you, Islanders and Coyotes — and I’d love to call the Vancouver Canucks frauds, but the Oilers have been so bad and the Canucks completely outplayed them on opening night so I’m conflicted… but in my heart of hearts, I do still think they are frauds. And also speaking of frauds, Brock Boeser??? After the four-goal performance on night one, we’ll see how close he gets to setting a new career high. Now on the flip side of that, Auston Matthews has back-to-back hat tricks — that is not someone I will call a fraud even though I have done so in the past. I hate to say it, but it might be time to stop being such a Leafs hater and just appreciate that Auston Matthews actually is a great player.

Evgeni Malkin is also off to a surprising, yet not-so-surprising start to the season. He has six points (two goals and goals assists) through three games and as he explained it – he hopes for the season to be over tomorrow so he can win the Hart Trophy. Yes, that is an actual quote from Malkin. Never change, Geno!

Regardless of how these teams have played this season, the Oilers can beat any of these teams if they just play their game and get a few key saves from time to time.

My tidbits today start with the fact that Jack Campbell has (for now) proven me wrong, he is not in his reputation era. He might get there eventually, but right now neither of our goaltenders are.

Also, Connor McDavid is off to a slow start this season by his usual standards. I mean, that’s not to say it’s only him, clearly our whole team is off to a slow start or we would have won a game, or at the very least not been killed 8-1 on opening night.

One thing Connor did this off-season was actually in an effort to avoid this I’m sure, but he held captains skates for the players as extra practice and well, as Baggedmilk joked, it appears to have done nothing for the success of the team thus far.

I feel like it would be safe to say it hasn’t done anything at all because if it was going to have an impact on the team it would’ve been in the first few games. They should’ve looked more ready and prepared than any other team, and well… losing 8-1 doesn’t scream ready or prepared to play.

Anyways, we’re two games into the season and there is a lot to be complaining about, but at the end of the day, it’s an incredibly long season and we have many more games and so much fun to be had.

So let’s leave this week in the past and look forward to our next three games.

Oh! And we announced Girls Night Out so don’t forget to mark it in your calendars. 🙂

Have a good week Oilersnation and I will see you next Sunday (hopefully with better things to say)!!!