ANAHEIM, Calif. \u2014 In what\u2019s become a sign of springtime in Southern California, the Edmonton Oilers are considering a goaltending change.<\/p>\n
On Friday night, the Oilers fell behind the Anaheim Ducks 2-1 in their first-round playoff series, courtesy of a 7-4, all-system failure in which Connor Ingram allowed six goals on 38 shots, his third straight game with a sub-.900 save percentage and more goals allowed than expected.<\/p>\n
On Saturday afternoon, coach Kris Knoblauch was asked if his team had reached a point at which swapping Ingram out for Tristan Jarry represented a viable path forward for a group that, in short order, has begun to lose the plot for reasons including (but certainly not limited to<\/a>) Ingram\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n Knoblauch might not walk through that door before Sunday\u2019s Game 4 at the Honda Center, but he sounded like a man who, yet again and through no real fault of his own, is circling the block. In both of their previous postseasons under Knoblauch \u2014 in 2025 against the Los Angeles Kings and 2024 against the Vancouver Canucks \u2014 the Oilers have had to change goalies midstream in the first two rounds and lived to tell the tale. It\u2019s reasonable for Knoblauch to think that they could pull it off a third time, but the fact that they\u2019re faced with the choice shouldn\u2019t surprise anyone. It\u2019s the logical endpoint of nearly a year\u2019s worth of mismanagement by Edmonton\u2019s front office, of the most important position in the sport.<\/p>\n \u201cI think going in, we were pretty sure \u2014 it was the same thing last year (against the Kings), and even the year before (against Vancouver),\u201d Knoblauch said. \u201cToday in (the) NHL, very rarely do you have one goalie play all the games in the playoffs. Twenty years ago and before, it was unheard of to be swapping goalies, but we\u2019ve got two good goalies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe feel confident that (Ingram and Jarry) can both play, and going into the playoffs, we felt that there was going to be a time that we\u2019re gonna have to make a switch at some time, whether that\u2019s for Game 4 or Game 5, whatever it is. But yeah, we have confidence in both.\u201d<\/p>\n Should they?<\/p>\n Ingram\u2019s story is remarkable, and his late-season run was equal parts outstanding, sorely needed and unexpected. He was struggling in the AHL when an injury to Jarry forced the Oilers to call him up, and by late March \u2014 after Jarry had gone from injured to brutally ineffective \u2014 he might have saved their playoff hopes. From March 23 on, he put up a .923 save percentage (10th in the NHL) and saved 0.7 goals above expected per 60 minutes (eighth). In seven starts, he allowed more than two goals just twice.<\/p>\n Now, though, the wheels are starting to wobble. Ingram played most of Friday night under duress, and Anaheim\u2019s first goal, by Mason McTavish, came on a redirection. The other five, though, were stoppable pucks to varying degrees, and plenty of the saves he made, particularly in Anaheim\u2019s 20-shot first period, were a struggle. Poor rebound control iced the cake.<\/p>\n Knoblauch, of course, made a point to mention how ugly the scene was in front of Ingram: \u201cWe can\u2019t be playing like that, giving them three-on-ones and two-on-ones, allowing them to get loose sticks in front of the net that we\u2019re not picking up, stuff like that. We have to play better.\u201d<\/p>\n In any case, Jarry has played in just nine games since Feb. 2. Since Edmonton acquired him from the Pittsburgh Penguins on Dec. 12, he has put up an .857 save percentage and saved fewer goals than expected in 13 of 19 appearances, according to Hockeystats.com<\/a>. Maybe just as relevantly here, in the only full playoff series of his career, against the New York Islanders in 2021, Jarry largely laid an egg, including a Game 7 in which he allowed five goals on 19 shots. In that one, he fired a double-overtime pass directly to Josh Bailey for the game-winner. Bailey, unfortunately for Jarry and the Penguins, played for the Islanders.<\/p>\n In the years since, his save percentage has steadily declined from .919, which earned him an All-Star spot in 2022, to .909 with Pittsburgh earlier this season, which earned him a ticket out of town, and to .857 with the Oilers, which bought him a seat on the bench. For a team whose Cup clock is ticking, he shouldn\u2019t be a primary option, let alone one that gobbled up $5.375 million in salary cap space and cost Edmonton three assets to acquire. That one is on Stan Bowman, as was the decision to stick with Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard for the start of the 2025-26 season despite Skinner\u2019s malignant inconsistency and Pickard\u2019s career-backup resume. After six weeks\u2019 worth of games, they were ready to move on to a high-cost, low-differential Plan B. In Edmonton\u2019s best-case scenario, Skinner and Jarry were a goalie version of the pointing Spider-Man meme<\/a>, but if one of the Spider-Men were twice as expensive as the other and prevented the Avengers from acquiring a scoring winger for their top six.<\/p>\n Knoblauch, to his credit, helped make the Skinner-Pickard tandem work until the bitter end last spring; Pickard took control against Los Angeles, Skinner found his game against the Vegas Golden Knights and Dallas Stars, and Pickard was in net for a win over the Florida Panthers that tied the Stanley Cup Final 2-2. Ultimately, though, the music stopped, and the Oilers found themselves without a chair. And now \u2014 or soon \u2014 they seemed destined for the same spot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ANAHEIM, Calif. \u2014 In what\u2019s become a sign of springtime in Southern California, the Edmonton Oilers are considering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[766,49,48,23752,453,448],"class_list":{"0":"post-629004","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edmonton","8":"tag-anaheim-ducks","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-edmonton","12":"tag-edmonton-oilers","13":"tag-nhl"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629004","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=629004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}