PREVIEW: Oilers vs. Flames (Preseason)<\/p>\n
EDMONTON, AB \u2013 One last chance to lock it in before the start of the regular season.<\/p>\n
The Edmonton Oilers will play host to the Calgary Flames in their final pre-season tune-up on Saturday night at Rogers Place before the focus shifts to Tuesday’s season opener against the Vancouver Canucks.<\/p>\n
The Oilers made a total of 15 roster moves on Friday, reducing the Training Camp roster to the 34 players that’ll make up the core of their 23-man squad for when the puck drops on the 2026-27\u00a0NHL campaign this Tuesday on home ice.<\/p>\n
With only one pre-season game left and the group down to its veterans and the last few holdouts competing for roster spots, there’s a shared belief in the locker room that the focus needs to shift towards making the most of these last few days to nail down the details for when games really start to matter.<\/p>\n
“It’s easier for the coaching staff, more importantly,” Leon Draisaitl said. “You have one meeting, you’ve\u00a0<\/p>\n
Draisaitl said it’ll be important for him & the rest of the top power-play unit to work out any issues they might have over their final 60 minutes of exhibition, after the emphasis during the previous practices and pre-season games was placed on building a new foundation for how they want to play.<\/p>\n
“We haven’t had\u00a0much time to work on it,” Draisaitl added. “We need to take the next couple of days to dial it in and get back to our patterns and what we want to accomplish. There isn’t much time left and we have to get on it.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PREVIEW: Oilers vs. Flames (Preseason) EDMONTON, AB \u2013 One last chance to lock it in before the start…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":906015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":["post-906014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906014","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=906014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/906015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}