The Edmonton Oilers should be embarrassed with themselves.

If Monday night’s performance against the Anaheim Ducks was any indication of what’s to come for this team when the playoffs hit, then the golf courses and trips to Cabo will be coming early.

The issues weren’t so much about their on-ice play — even though there were more putrid moments than not as Anaheim won 3-2, with blatant errors leaving Olivier Rodrigue out to try — it was the fact that the Oilers have lost any bite they once had.

You can say it’s a roster construction issue, or the fact that a guy like Evander Kane has been out of the lineup for the entire season, but I don’t buy it. All season long Corey Perry has stood up for his teammates, but the 39-year-old was left entirely out to dry against Anaheim after Radko Gudas’ unpenalized chicken wing headshot in the second period.

There was a woeful lack of response from his teammates, but the issue in it pre-dates Kris Knoblauch as head coach of the team. A moment in which it can be pointed to goes back to the 2022 playoffs in Game 1 of the Oilers’ second-round series against the Calgary Flames.

Calgary took liberties on the Oilers that night, and after the game, then bench boss Jay Woodcroft. After the game, Woodcroft spoke about how if opposing teams wanted to take liberties on the Oilers that was fine — they would make them pay on the power play.

It was a time that the Oilers man-advantage unit was firing on all cylinders, but it’s a mantra that has somehow seemed to stick with this team ever since. They just don’t seem to have the bite they once did.

So how did the Oilers respond to Gudas’ hit? By, well, doing nothing. Yeah, sure — Darnell Nurse grabbed Gudas after a whistle, but when Perry returned to the ice, there were multiple further instances where he gave Perry a shot: one by way of a forearm shiver in the back in the neutral zone, another with a kidney punch near the Ducks net where Adam Henrique was the only person pulled from a pile up.

An end-of-the-second-period scrum put the Oilers up on the power play, leading into the third, but without their superstars in Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, the man advantage was anemic against a 30th ranked penalty kill, going 0-for-6 in a game they lost by one goal.

It’s not like the Oilers don’t have guys in the lineup who can handle business. We all saw the right hook Vasily Podkolzin has in the repertoire earlier this year. Nurse can drop the gloves. Mattias Janmark has some sneaky scrapping toughness, too.

Gudas did right in avoiding any legitimate type of retribution, as Edmonton allowed themselves to get distracted in the game and get away from their own game. That’s gamesmanship, right there.

Losing two points when the Oilers are trying to chase down home ice advantage is certainly far from ideal, but the score isn’t even the most concerning part of all of this: it’s the fact that the Oilers are gone soft before our very eyes mere weeks away from the start of the playoffs.

Nurse’s comments from after the game highlighted it further.

“I thought guys dug in and tried to get physical and… yeah. That’s his game,” he said. “Sometimes things happen out there, people can choose to answer or not. I thought our response was pretty good.”

Despite that, defenceman Brett Kulak told Sportsnet’s Mark Spector that “multiple guys” offered Gudas a fight.

“It would be nice if, when you throw a cheap play and you take someone out, you’re responsible for what you did.”

All signs continue to point to the Oilers having another first round matchup with the Los Angeles Kings for the fourth consecutive season. Make no mistake, the Oilers know what they’re walking into here, squaring up against a team that loves to make noise in games with greasy play between whistles and no reluctancy to muck it up after it they blow, too.

Nothing about Edmonton’s game right now indicates they’re ready for that fight — superstars on the shelf or not.

Zach Laing is Oilersnation’s associate editor, senior columnist, and The Nation Network’s news director. He also makes up one-half of the DFO DFS Report. He can be followed on Twitter, currently known as X, at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach.laing@bettercollective.com.