Top Stories of 2023 – No. 2: Milan Lucic says the Calgary Flames played into the Edmonton Oilers’ hands in 2022 playoffs defeat

“I think we opened it up way too much against them. You can’t open it up at all against those guys.

Honestly, the worst thing that could’ve happened is we won Game 1, what was it, 9-5 or 9-6. So then you know game one is opened up, so then what do we think right away, ‘We think we can score with these guys because we put up nine goals in Game 1’ and thought that was the worst thing that could happen.

Every game was a shit-show and then I think we lost our heads and lost our cool, the way we needed to be, and needed to play. And then you know every time we took a penalty, they would score. Every time we got a lead, they would score right away after that.

And then every time we turned the puck over, it ended up in our net. It was just uncharacteristic of how we played that whole season and how we did our thing, and I think it was a lack of adjustments because we didn’t tighten up it after that. We didn’t tighten up the neutral zone, we didn’t tighten up the  defensive zone. We didn’t just you know do all that type of stuff like we did in the regular season.”