The Day After +2.0: Oilers blow another two-goal lead against Kings but lock things down in third to tie series

“I’ll be honest. I think the third in Game 1 we did a lot of the same thing,” Mattias Ekholm said about shutting the door in the third period. “We flipped them up, made them go 200 feet the whole time. They didn’t really get any sustained offense. It’s about when they get the red and dump it in. It’s about breaking out and not having them spend too much time in our end and I think we did that even better tonight. Obviously, the result followed.”

“You’re not going to win 16 games by your top two lines scoring every goal and doing everything,” Draisaitl said about getting goals from Derek Ryan and Klim Kostin. “You need guys like Klimmer, you need guys like Derek Ryan to chip in every once in a while. All year, we’ve been really, really lucky at finding those guys and having those guys on our team.”

“It’s emotion, right?” Zach Hyman said of Klim Kostin. “Klim is a guy who plays with emotion and he’s physical, he’s got a great shot; he almost scored one in the first too when he hit the bar and then was able to put that one in. Just a great goal for him and a great goal for our team.”

“I was looking for Leo [Draisaitl] actually,” Kostin said. “I was just trying to give the puck [to] his hands. I trust him more than myself. I saw three guys around me. I had nothing to do [but] shoot the puck and it went in.”

“He’s been the best player on the ice for two games in the series, by far,” Oilers head coach Jay Woodcroft said of Leon Draisaitl. “He found a way to get things done in different ways and it was a big reason we won the game tonight.”

“Yeah, not to us. It didn’t look like that,” Woodcroft said when asked if he saw the game slipping away. “Actually, you know what, for us, we have a team that I thought played a really good hockey game again today save for maybe a few minutes there in the second period we would’ve liked to have back. In between periods, we talked about how that’s a growth opportunity for our team and as we move forward here in both games, I thought we controlled the bulk of the play in both games. We had a couple of minutes we’d like to have back in both games, but in the end, we found a way to win the game tonight.”

“It’s a poor recipe for taking a swing at this Edmonton team, falling behind,” Kings head coach Todd McLellan said. “When you’re ahead you have a much better chance of checking and not taking as much risk as you have to come back. The frustrating thing for me is that there were some things that we needed to do early in the game. We didn’t decide to do them until the second, third period.”