EDMONTON, AB \u2013 What an ‘Ek’ of a night.<\/p>\n
Defenceman Mattias Ekholm recorded his first career hat-trick, scoring three of his team’s five goals from defenceman on Monday, while forward Leon Draisaitl had four assists for the Edmonton Oilers in a 7-4 win over the Anaheim Ducks at Rogers Place to end their rivals’ win streak at seven games.<\/p>\n
“He’s going to be tough to play against every night, so when he has a night like this, it’s obviously exciting,” Ryan Nugent-Hopkin said. “It makes a huge difference for our team. He just decided to take over tonight. Bouch had a crazy game the other night, so it’s cool that his partner did that, and the whole D-core stepped up.”<\/p>\n
After Evan Bouchard recorded Edmonton’s first hat-trick from a defenceman in almost 20 years in Saturday’s 6-5 overtime win over the Capitals, Ekholm helped make NHL history alongside his D partner by making the Oilers the first-ever team to have defencemen record hat-tricks in consecutive games.<\/p>\n
The Oilers scored four straight goals from their blueliners in a 3:49 stretch of the second period, with Spencer Stastney getting a bounce for his first goal in Blue & Orange before Darnell Nurse scored unassisted between a pair of Ekholm tallies inside to give Edmonton the three-goal cushion they needed.<\/p>\n
The Ducks fought back to make it a one-goal game with 6:22 left in regulation after forward Mikael Granlund picked up his own hat-trick, but Connor McDavid added insurance at six-on-five before Ekholm completed his three-goal effort with 11 seconds remaining into the empty net to secure the win.<\/p>\n
“Pretty remarkable night,” Head Coach Kris Knoblauch said. “With the back-to-back hat tricks and then Mattias playing as many games as he has and finally getting his first, he told me he was close to getting a hat trick a long time ago, but tonight he wasn’t missing that. That was right down the middle.<\/p>\n
“It’s nice to have those guys, and the odds of him scoring a hat-trick tonight were probably pretty low. But it’s pretty exciting. He’s been playing really good hockey, and the fact that he got three tonight, everyone’s really happy for him.”<\/p>\n
Zach Hyman recorded a goal and an assist alongside Connor McDavid, who now sits atop the NHL’s scoring race with 92 points (33G, 59A).<\/p>\n
The victory moved the Oilers three points ahead of the Ducks for second place in the Pacific Division with a 27-19-8 record.<\/p>\n
The Oilers will continue their eight-game homestand at Rogers Place when they host the San Jose Sharks in another divisional battle on Thursday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDMONTON, AB \u2013 What an ‘Ek’ of a night. Defenceman Mattias Ekholm recorded his first career hat-trick, scoring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":440584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-440583","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}