It was looking a little like early October in January for the Oilers on Saturday night in Chicago.
Edmonton got off to a slow start to the 2024-25 campaign, dropping three games in a row out of the gate. The most embarrassing for the Stanley Cup hopefuls was a 5-2 loss at the hands of the rebuilding Chicago Blackhawks at home in their second game of the year.
The Oilers and Hawks met again this weekend for the first time since that early-season gaffe in Edmonton and it looked like more of the same early on. Chicago opened the scoring five minutes into the game and they extended their lead to 2-0 before the end of the first period.
“I think it’s safe to say the goalie was no good there for a while,” Calvin Pickard told Mark Spector of Sportsnet.
“I didn’t like the way I started at all, (down) 2-0. I was a little bit dopey and there’s no excuse for that. The third one I can live with. But yeah, we played well, and the silver lining was, I kind of stuck with it and made a couple saves at the end. But I need to be better off the get go, for sure.”
The Oilers buried three goals in the second period and the Hawks scored one, sending the two teams into the third with the score knotted at 3-3.
Edmonton got a power play opportunity a few minutes into the final frame and Zach Hyman managed to shove a loose puck in the crease past Chicago goaltender Arvid Soderblom to give the Oilers their first lead of the game. The Hawks got a power play of their own in the final minute of play and Pickard made some huge stops to seal the victory.
“It was a goal we haven’t seen for a while, just throwing it into the net area, and Zach Hyman finds a way to put it in,” Head coach Kris Knoblauch said. “Hyman had a strong game. It was nice to see him get rewarded with at least one tonight.”
The Oilers started off this three-game road swing with a commanding 4-0 win over the Boston Bruins and followed that up with a frustrating 5-3 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins. The team hasn’t dropped back-to-back games in regulation time since early November and they weren’t about to see that strong streak end against a basement-dwelling team like Chicago.
“We play 82 games,” Hyman said when talking with Spector. “We’re not going to win every game. You’ve got to be able to find a way to win, crawl out of a game, have different guys stepping up.
 “You’ve got to find many ways to win. You’ve got to nip losing. You don’t want to lose two in a row. We’re on a good stretch.”
The Oilers will return home for a Pacific Division showdown with the Los Angeles Kings, who are just two points back of Edmonton in the standings with a couple of games in hand. After that, they’ll hit the road again for three games against the Minnesota Wild, Colorado Avalanche, and Vancouver Canucks.