“Any time you pull a goalie, the reasoning’s always to try and spark your group,” DeBoer said after the Game 5 loss to the Oilers. “So that was the number-one reason. We had talked endlessly in this series about trying to play with the lead. Obviously we’re in a 2-0 hole right away.

“I didn’t take that lightly and I didn’t blame it all on Jake, but the reality is, if you go back to last year’s playoffs, he’s lost six of seven games to Edmonton. And we give up two (goals) on two (shots) in an elimination game. It was partly to spark our team and wake them up, and partly knowing that (the) status quo had not been working. That’s a pretty big sample size.”

“Listen, we were all to blame for coming up short again, and it starts with me,” DeBoer said in an exclusive sitdown with NHL.com. “It was on me, it was on all the coaches, it was on all the players, it was on the organization as a whole. We all created the disappointment. We were all to blame, not just one guy.

“When all the questions at the postgame press conference were about Jake, I should have redirected the topic to reflect that this wasn’t just about him, this was about all of us. We — and I stress the word ‘we’ — did not get the job done. We were on a run in which we’d lost six of our past seven games against Edmonton in the third round dating back to 2024. In one of my answers, I said he’d lost six of seven to them. But it wasn’t just him. It was all of us. That’s not on just one guy. I should have made that more clear.”