Oilers game notes: Final regular season road trip ends with matinee against Kings<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to believe the playoffs are as close as they are. For as much as this regular season has flown by for the Edmonton Oilers<\/a>, it\u2019s been a long, arduous winter.<\/p>\n And while today is moving day at The Masters, it\u2019s moving day for the Oilers, who need a point against the Los Angeles Kings this afternoon to clinch their spot in the postseason dance.<\/p>\n Edmonton Oilers @ Los Angeles KingsDate: Saturday, April 11Start Time: 2 p.m. MTLocation: Los Angeles, Cali.\u00a0Venue: Crypto.com ArenaWatch: Sportsnet WestThe Oilers remain without Zach Hyman and Leon Draisaitl as they work their way back from injury, but had some good news Friday, as Connor Ingram was a full participant at practice. He left Wednesday\u2019s game against the San Jose Sharks with an undisclosed injury, which saw Tristan Jarry enter in the third period to close out a 5-2 win. At the time of writing, the Oilers haven\u2019t named a starter for the matinee affair, but Ingram is a possibility to play.The Oilers had some new-look lines<\/a> at practice, as Max Jones and Kasperi Kapanen climbed the lineup to the second line alongside Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. In 20 games this season, Jones has scored three goals and five points, all of which at five-on-five, averaging just eight minutes and 38 seconds per game. Small sample size aside, his 1.04 goals per hour at five-on-five is the same rate as Connor McDavid. He\u2019s been a solid contributor and a candidate to stick on the fourth line once the team gets healthy.Is the pairing of Darnell Nurse and Connor Murphy all it\u2019s being made out to be? I\u2019m not fully convinced. While the Oilers appear committed to them as a pairing, there\u2019s some cracks in the armour. They\u2019ve slightly outscored the opposition in 239 five-on-five minutes 7-6, they\u2019re allowing 3.35 goals against per hour and a boatload of scoring chances, 34 against per hour of ice time. Murphy has seen the majority of his minutes against elite competition and has been outscored 7-0 in them. I like him as a player, but I don\u2019t know if I like him with Nurse.The Kings, meanwhile, have been quite the team to keep an eye on this season. With a 33-26-19 record, they enter the game holding the second wild card spot in thanks to a 5-2-3 run over their last 10 games. All the while, they\u2019ve set an NHL record for overtime games played in a single season with 32, going 13-19 in them. Yet, of the 50 teams in history who have played 25 or more overtime games in a season, they rank 28th in win-loss percentage in them.Since the Olympic break, the Kings\u2019 top-six has been red hot. Their top line of Artemi Panarin, Anze Kopitar and Adrian Kempe have outscored the opposition 17-10, while the second line has broken even at 12-12. Both share strong underlying statistics, controlling the expected goal share and shot attempt share with ease. When these two teams last played on Feb. 26 and the Oilers won 8-1, Panarin was in his second game with the Kings, still getting his feet wet. He\u2019s scored eight goals and 25 points in 22 games since the trade<\/a>.Zach Laing is Oilersnation\u2019s managing editor, and The Nation Network\u2019s news director. He also makes up one-half of the Daily Faceoff DFS Hockey Report<\/a>. He can be followed on X at @zjlaing<\/a>, or reached by email at zach.laing@bettercollective.com.<\/p>\n aa<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oilers game notes: Final regular season road trip ends with matinee against Kings It\u2019s hard to believe the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597838,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":["post-597837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-edmonton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597837","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=597837"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597837\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597837"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597837"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}