Connor McDavid is glad the Edmonton Oilers are in the NHL’s weakest division this season.<\/p>\n
“Obviously, we’re fortunate to play in (the Pacific Division),” McDavid said after Edmonton’s 5-2 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday. “A lot of teams are fortunate to play in this division. It’s a bit of a pillow fight right now. Thankful to not have lost any ground.<\/p>\n
“That being said, we gotta find a way to win some games here on the road. Two big ones against Utah and Vegas. We gotta make some ground too. Good challenge ahead.”<\/p>\n
The Pacific-leading Anaheim Ducks rank 14th in the NHL with 80 points, a mark that would put them outside of the playoffs entirely in the Eastern Conference. Ten teams in the East have more points than Anaheim.<\/p>\n
Edmonton is second in the Pacific with 77 points. The Utah Mammoth, who currently hold the first wild-card spot as the fourth-placed team in the Central, have 78 points.<\/p>\n
The Oilers are five points clear of dropping out of a playoff spot despite ranking 18th league-wide.<\/p>\n
All six Pacific teams that played Saturday lost their respective games. That also occurred Thursday.<\/p>\n
Edmonton is expected to be without star forward Leon Draisaitl for the rest of the regular season due to a lower-body injury.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Connor McDavid is glad the Edmonton Oilers are in the NHL’s weakest division this season. “Obviously, we’re fortunate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":554406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":{"0":"post-554405","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\/554405","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=554405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/554406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}