Do you remember when the Oilers had the third overall pick at the 2014 NHL Draft, and everyone was talking about how the Oilers should take Sam Bennett? That was, of course, until he couldn\u2019t do a pull-up. It\u2019s wild to think about now, but there were a lot of people who believed Edmonton should avoid Draisaitl because he was too slow and likely wouldn\u2019t score a ton. More of a passer than a finisher, they said. Well, here we are 11 years later, and Leon Draisaitl has developed into one of the best players on earth. No disrespect to Aaron Ekblad, Sam Reinhart and Sam Bennett, all of those guys are doing very well with the Panthers, but there\u2019s no way that Drai wouldn\u2019t go first overall in that group if we did a re-draft with the benefit of hindsight.<\/p>\n
And on Sunday night in Montreal<\/a>, most of us were waiting for Leon Draisaitl to register his 1000th point and cement himself in history as one of the 100 players in the league to reach the feat. Unfortunately, Drai did not get the point he needed. And the reason I\u2019m writing about this is because I actually thought the rest of the team tried to hard to get him there. There were moments on the power play when clear shots were being passed up to set Draisaitl up with a cross-ice one-timer, when a shot from wherever the puck was would probably have been the better choice. As much as I get why everyone wants to get him to 1000 points, I also think he\u2019s so damned good that it\u2019s going to come naturally without having to force it. Maybe it\u2019s just me, but as someone who bet on Drai to get a point against the Habs, I legitimately thought Oilers were trying too hard to make fetch happen<\/a>. Big Sexy 2.0 is going to get his point, but I just don\u2019t think everyone around him has to try so hard to make it happen.THE FUTURE FOR CALVIN PICKARDCalvin Pickard got his ninth start of the season on Sunday in Montreal<\/a>, and in the hours leading up to the game, all I could think about was what the last couple of days must have been like for him. There\u2019s a zero percent chance he didn\u2019t know about or hear the noise about the team\u2019s goaltending, and for a lot of people, finding a way to upgrade on Pickard was more critical than upgrading on Skinner. But now that Stan Bowman pulled the trigger to bring Tristan Jarry to town, I can\u2019t help but wonder what the future looks like for our pal Cal. We know the guys in the room love him \u2014 they\u2019ve defended him as recently as this season \u2014 but the NHL is a results-based business, and Pickard\u2019s haven\u2019t been nearly good enough. But when the team loves the guy and goes to bat for him with the GM, it\u2019s fair to wonder how much the power of friendship<\/a> comes into play with what happens to Pickard next.Will Bowman still look to upgrade<\/a> on the backup position, knowing full well how much our current guy matters to the players in the room? Does he care? Only time will reveal what happens between the crease, but for the time being, we have to hope Pickard can start to round back into form. Against Montreal, I thought Pickard was the best Oiler on the ice. And even though I know I\u2019ll take heat in the comments for giving him love after allowing four goals on 27 shots, it\u2019s hard to ignore that he was faced with multiple breakaways, odd-man rushes, and clean shots from in tight that he mostly handled with care. The guy was on an island for most of the night. Put another way, the Oilers probably would have lost that game regardless of who was in net, and I think it would be deeply unfair to hang this one on Pickard.SPECIAL TEAMS WERE NOT SO SPECIALIt\u2019s not often that we take shots at the Oilers<\/a>\u2018 special teams, but I felt like last night\u2019s performance deserved a few words. We all know how dangerous Edmonton\u2019s power play can be, but you wouldn\u2019t have known it from the way they handled their five power play opportunities. While scoring once on five chances with the man advantage isn\u2019t horrible by any stretch, it\u2019s hard not to feel like there were a few more opportunities that could have cashed with a few adjustments. And the first thing that pops to mind was the two-minute 5-on-3 that the boys got in the first period. Even though the Oilers were actually pretty damned good in those two minutes, they ultimately couldn\u2019t score. It doesn\u2019t matter how many looks you get if you can\u2019t get any of them past the goalie. It\u2019s hard not to imagine how different things might have gone had they been able to score there.<\/p>\n On the PK, the Oilers gave up a pair of goals in four shorthanded situations, and it doesn\u2019t take a data scientist to figure out that running a 50% penalty kill is probably going to be a problem. On the first one, Ivan Demidov ripped the puck past Pickard with a perfectly placed shot. Honestly, I\u2019d tend to tip my cap to the shooter on this one, but even if you do respect the finish, the Oilers actually had a chance to clear the puck only moments before. On Nick Suzuki\u2019s goal, Alec Regula lost his position and allowed the Montreal captain to gain the inside ice. Once Suzuki was the first guy to get to the post, the tap-in he scored will likely go down as one of the easiest he\u2019ll ever score at the NHL level. The point being that even if you give the Habs credit for the way they scored their two PP goals, both featured mistakes by Edmonton that should have been avoided. And when you lose the PP and the PK battle in the same game, it\u2019s not hard to understand why the Oilers ended up losing the game.<\/p>\n PRESENTED BY VIVID SEATS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leon Draisaitl\u2019s 1000th point has to wait, Calvin Pickard, and the Oilers lost on special teams The Edmonton…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":346531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-346530","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/346531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}