PREVIEW: Oilers vs. Senators<\/p>\n
EDMONTON, AB \u2013 The March to the playoffs and the Trade Deadline continue.<\/p>\n
For the first time in a month since before the Olympic break, the Edmonton Oilers will play on home ice on Tuesday when they return to Rogers Place to host the Ottawa Senators to begin a two-game\u00a0homestand.<\/p>\n
The Oilers are looking to keep pace in a tight Pacific Division playoff race after dropping two out of three on their California road trip following the Olympic break, including an 8-1 thrashing of the Los Angeles Kings in between 6-5 and 5-4 defeats to the Anaheim Ducks and San Jose Sharks.<\/p>\n
Despite scoring a combined 17 goals over the three games, the Oilers were defeated twice after their defensive mistakes culminated in two tough defeats in high-scoring affairs against the Ducks and Sharks, particularly on Saturday after they fed San Jose’s transition game.<\/p>\n
The goals continue to come for the Oilers, but their struggles to keep the puck out of their net at even strength and on the penalty kill remain a point of concern\u00a0as they enter the stretch drive of the regular season.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think I put my finger on any one specific player area,” Head Coach Kris Knoblauch said of his team’s recent struggles defensively, “I think there’s a little bit of everything. One thing I like since the break is that we have done better at defending off the rush. Going back to the end of January and those two games in February, I thought we were giving up a lot there, and that’s been better. But whether or not it’s in the defensive zone, it’s just a lot of miscues.”<\/p>\n
“We have players around the net and we’re protecting the slot. There was a lot of emphasis during the Olympic break when we came back and had those practices on protecting the slot a lot better than we were, and we’ve have been doing that, but sometimes we’ve got guys there and we still don’t get the job done.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PREVIEW: Oilers vs. Senators EDMONTON, AB \u2013 The March to the playoffs and the Trade Deadline continue. For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":510989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":{"0":"post-510988","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edmonton","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-edmonton"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510988","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=510988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/510989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}