Connor Ingram<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhat were they doing back home Sunday night, the only two guys with \u201cWelcome to Imperial, The Home Of\u2026\u201d signs, both on the same team in an NHL game?<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll bet they were in the rink watching it. Maybe the bar,\u201d said Ingram. \u201cI\u2019ll have to text Dad and see what he’s up to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The crazy part is, Knoblauch and Ingram didn\u2019t really know each other very well back home \u2014\u00a0there\u2019s a 19-year age gap between the two. But in a town that small, the two families intertwined.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis Mom and Dad worked for the school,\u201d Knoblauch said. \u201cMr. Ingram was our seventh grade homeroom teacher. He was my football coach, track and field coach, volleyball coach, you name it. Yes, I know the family very well.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMrs. Knoblauch, Holly, she was our receptionist at my school my whole life,\u201d Ingram told me back in November. \u201cBob (Kris\u2019 Dad), he ran the rink when I was really little, and then he refereed basically every minor hockey game I ever played.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s crazy, isn\u2019t it, how fate would lead these two to the same team, at the same time, with Ingram resurrecting a National Hockey League career after spending time in the NHL\/NHLPA program due to OCD \u2014\u00a0Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, a mental health condition characterized by uncontrollable, recurring thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviours (compulsions).<\/p>\n
But Knoblauch lost his No. 1 goalie, Tristan Jarry, to injury \u2014\u00a0\u201cHe’s is going to be out a couple of weeks. We won’t see him until the New Year at some point,\u201d he said before the game \u2014\u00a0and he needed a \u2018tender from the farm.<\/p>\n
Enter Ingram, who had been searching for his game in Bakersfield after missing camp, and who hadn’t played an NHL game since last February with Utah.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of days I didn\u2019t think it would ever happen again,\u201d Ingram said after his first NHL win in 10 months. \u201cIt\u2019s just the truth of it in this world. There are 64 spots in the world to do this, so you don\u2019t take it for granted. Any day that you\u2019re up here, it\u2019s a huge honour.\u201d<\/p>\n
Had Ingram been forced to wait for his American League numbers to force a call-up, he might have been down in Bako for a while. He had a goals-against average of 4.04 and a save percentage of .856 for the AHL Condors \u2014\u00a0not the kind of numbers that had GM Stan Bowman reaching for the phone.<\/p>\n
But then Jarry got hurt, and Ingram \u2014\u00a0for one day at least \u2014\u00a0seized the opportunity. He didn\u2019t look anything like an .856 goalie, stopping 26 shots as the Oilers clung to its lead after jumping ahead 4-0.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s easier (playing in the NHL) \u2014\u00a0what you think should happen does happen,\u201d Ingram said of the two leagues. \u201cI rely heavily on reading the game. I\u2019ve never been a guy who was fast enough or quick enough to react, so I had to be one step ahead. In this league it\u2019s just easier to do that.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere you think the puck is going to go, 90 per cent of the time it does. But it\u2019s also a huge step. It\u2019s a lot faster than what I\u2019ve been used to for the last couple of months.\u201d<\/p>\n
A game that saw Trent Frederic healthy-scratched after producing just three points in 36 games likely felt like just another game tacked on to the end of a road trip for Edmonton, which had closed out a five-game roadie just the day before in Minnesota. To come home and beat a division rival in regulation is massive, as Edmonton moves to within two points of first-place Anaheim, sitting tied with Vegas at 42 points.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey should have been much more fatigued than we were,\u201d admitted Vegas head coach Bruce Cassidy, whose team had lost the night before in Calgary. \u201cIt was their sixth game in nine days in six different cities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Connor McDavid was once again unstoppable, stretching his points streak to 10 games. He has 24 points in that span, and blazed around the Vegas defence to open the scoring Sunday before adding two helpers on an Oilers power play that went 2-for-3. It\u2019s the top PP unit in the NHL these days, clicking along at 33.3 per cent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDMONTON \u2014\u00a0Imperial, Saskatchewan, is just another pimple on the prairie, as my Dad used to say. And he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":361801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-361800","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\/361800","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=361800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/361801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}