Saturday night was a measuring-stick kind of game.

Hockey Night in Canada. The Edmonton Oilers hosting the Colorado Avalanche on three days rest. McDavid vs. MacKinnon. These are the kind of games you’d expect a struggling team like the Oilers to show up for.

Instead, the Oilers might’ve just shown their true colours as a team that looks like a shell of its former self, getting embarrassed as the Avalanche did whatever they wanted, eventually running the score up to 9-1. It was the first time the team had been outscored by eight or more goals in a game since January 27th, 2009, when they lost 10-2 to the Buffalo Sabres.

“I definitely hope this is rock bottom for us,” said a defeated Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch after the game. “I hope this wakes up a lot of guys and we understand that we’ve got a lot of growing to do to become a good hockey team, like our expectations are for ourselves”

While the likely suspects led the charge for Colorado, with Cale Makar scoring two goals, and Nathan MacKinnon having a pair of his own and two assists to boot, the Avalanche had scoring up and down the lineup.

It’s easy to point and look at the goaltending as a major point of contention for this Oilers team. Neither Stuart Skinner nor Calvin Pickard has been good enough this season — or on Saturday night, for that matter, as the former allowed four goals on 14 shots and the latter five goals on 21 shots — but the team in front of them has been miles from good enough.

Now through 16 games, the numbers are stark for this version of the Edmonton Oilers compared to the same start in the previous two seasons.

At five-on-five, the Oilers have scored just 26 goals to start this season, a problem they faced in 2024-25 scoring 31 and in 2023-24 with 27, leaving them with an average goals for per hour rate of 2.2.

There was reason to believe the goalscoring would improve as the team had been generating 3.2 expected goals for per hour, on average, and it did in each season. This year? The Oilers are generating just 2.3 expected goals for per hour — the fifth-worst rate in the league.

Their ability to control games has dwindled, too, with the team controlling just 48.6 percent of the expected goal share, compared to an average of 56.8 percent over the last two. Their scoring chance share has dropped from an average of 56.5 percent to 46.6 percent, and the high-danger scoring chance share has gone from 59.8 percent on average to 46.8 percent.

To put it simply: the Oilers have gone from being one of the most dominant teams in the league, to looking like the Oilers that were annual draft lottery favourites.

And for a team that has, for two straight years, dug themselves out of a sluggish start to the season, it’s easy to think that they’re going to be able to do it again, right? That’s the hope, of course, but sitting idly by waiting for it to happen isn’t how it’s going to get done.

“I think we’ve been probably a little overconfident that things will work out,” said Knoblauch.

“This team’s been in trying times several times over the years, and they’ve always worked it out just because they’ve found a way to play better, step up. And I think right now, in the last couple weeks, I’ve seen, we’ve been just kind of waiting for that moment to happen.”

Surely it can’t get worse, right? Never say never.

After they host the Columbus Blue Jackets Monday night, the Oilers embark on a seven-game Eastern Conference road trip, an annual one they take that includes visits to the Washington Capitals, Carolina Hurricanes, Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers, sometimes among others. It hasn’t typically been a trip that’s gone well, going 1-4 in 2024-25 and 1-3 in 2023-24, getting outscored 55-41.

This version will be longer, and the stakes higher than ever before.

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