The Edmonton Oilers found themselves on a bit of a run, and there was no better opportunity to extend their winning streak to three games than a visit by the awful Buffalo Sabres in the second half of a back-to-back. Of course, that’s what sets up the trap. This should be a layup. A slam dunk. Two of the easiest points the Oilers collected all season. But if you’ve been around long enough, you surely remember a time or twelve when the Hockey Gords took situations just like this one and flipped the expected outcome on its head. That’s what happened last night when the Oilers took the first two periods off, spotted Buffalo a 3-0 lead, and took until the third period to figure out it was time to try again. Good times, right? Final Score: 4-3 Sabres in OT.

If you were talking about the Oilers in the day or hours leading up to puck drop, you probably heard about Tuesday’s game against the Sabres being a trap game. With all of the odds and schedule and chatter and momentum and improving vibes in the Oilers’ favour, all signs pointed to this being an easy win for Edmonton. Every number on earth would suggest that to be true. But the problem with sports is that there are no free lunches. There are no easy wins at the NHL level just because you think the other team isn’t good enough or that you’re getting them on the second half of a back-to-back. Regardless of position in the standings, any team can win on any given night, especially when one side plays with next to no urgency for 40 minutes.

At the end of the day, trap games are like counting chickens before they’ve hatched, putting the cart before the horse, or any other analogy you can think of. I assume these are lessons from the Hockey Gords geared at keeping us humble. They must have heard all of our “the Oilers are so back” talk over the past few days and felt that another bump in the road is what we need to maintain focus. How can the Oilers be back if they can’t even beat the second-to-last-place team? Lesson learned. To reach the mountaintop, we must not let short-term successes cloud the mission. I think those two lopsided wins over Seattle and Winnipeg may have gotten to our heads a little bit, but now that we’ve been checked back to earth, I promise to be better moving forward. Hand up, that’s on me.

If there’s one thing about trap games, it’s usually that the better team underestimated the will of their opponent. They look like they thought winning would be easy. The usual urgency isn’t there, the simple plays disappear, and everything looks forced. “Ah, Buffalo stinks, and we’ll walk through them. No problem.” Of course, I don’t believe anyone in the Oilers’ room would say anything like that, but I can understand why they might think it. Like all of us, they might have seen that Buffalo got stomped the night before in Calgary, where they’re at in the standings, and how they had lost three straight games, walking into the night with a mindset that winning would be a layup. Why play hard when you can play down? And that’s when you get burned.

Instead of walking through a bottom-feeder, the Oilers got outworked, out-battled, outmanned, and outscored, dropping round two of the season series 4-3 in OT and by a 9-4 combined total over six periods and change. It wasn’t until Edmonton was down by a field goal with only a period to play that they started to put their foot on the gas. Imagine how things would have gone had they played that way for two periods? Or even 60 minutes? And while I absolutely believe the players when they said in the post-game interviews that you can’t expect to beat any team in the NHL anymore, you sure wouldn’t have guessed that by the way things shook out. If the Oilers are going to erase their slow start, these are the games they can’t sleepwalk through. It’s one thing to have an off night, but it’s another thing to lose because it looked like you weren’t trying that hard.

If I’m going to offer a positive to take away from this game to keep things balanced, it would probably be that the Oilers found a way to make things interesting. Not that I’m into handing out participation trophies, but this was a game where the team could have easily folded their hand and punted until their one on Thursday. Instead of taking their ball and going home, the boys plugged their controllers in and got to work. And for the first time in the game, the Oilers looked like they were the better team. For the first time, they looked like they understood that winning was something they were going to have to earn, not be given. And once the Oilers started playing that way, the Sabres couldn’t do much but buckle up and hang on for dear life.

Once the boys got their legs moving, there wasn’t much standing in their way. How else would you explain erasing a 3-0 lead in the span of 19:58 in the third period? When the Oilers were at their best, the Sabres couldn’t hang, and that’s how this game even got to overtime in the first place. Unfortunately, they only played that way for one-third of the game. And when you only show up for 20 minutes of a 60-minute hockey game, it’s pretty damned hard to get the job done. So even as I’m actively trying to speak nicely about the way things went in the third period, I keep getting more and more frustrated that it took having their backs against the wall for the give-a-shit to kick in. We’re too far into the season to be happy about getting a loser point against a last-place team, and it’s incredibly frustrating that we’re talking about another loss that was entirely Edmonton’s fault. I really did try to be positive… I just struggled to get there.

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