EDMONTON, AB \u2013\u00a0Not even a Hurricane could stop this Category Five explosion.<\/p>\n
Led by a pair of incredible performances from Leon\u00a0Draisaitl and Connor McDavid, who each had two goals & three assists, the Edmonton Oilers staged an epic comeback against the defending Stanley Cup champions on Thursday night at Rogers Place to improve to 8-1-1 this season with a 6-5 shootout victory over the Carolina Hurricanes.<\/p>\n
McDavid became the fifth player in League history to reach 30 points in 10 games or fewer and now leads the League in points with eight goals and 23 helpers, while Draisaitl extended his scoring streak to seven goals in five games and now has 10 goals through 10 games this season.<\/p>\n
“They’re going in right now, but I know how this goes,” Draisaitl said. “There are going to be times where it’s not going to go in as easily, then there are times where you seem to get two for three nights in a row. I’m trying not to read too much into the goal-scoring or points situation. It can be fluky sometimes, so I’ll take them when they come and work for them when they’re not coming.”<\/p>\n
After losing defenceman Mattias Ekholm early in the third period while trailing 4-2 to the Hurricanes, the Oilers tied it quickly on back-to-back goals from\u00a0McDavid & Draisaitl 2:25 apart, before the captain’s late tying goal & second tally of the night with 1:28 left in regulation erased Juuso Valimaki’s late go-ahead goal to send the game to overtime.<\/p>\n
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, making his season debut in his 16th season, had a goal & assist on the power play before delivering the only goal in the shootout following an exciting but scoreless extra frame, giving the Oilers a heroic 6-5 victory.<\/p>\n
“The bottom line is we were down going into the third, and we talked about being ultra competitive and finding a way to crawl back, and we did that,” Head Coach Mike Babcock said. “In the end, we won. But we got a ton of lessons here tonight about competitiveness, doing things right, and about having everybody be important.”<\/p>\n
For the second game in a row, Edmonton’s power play looked unbeatable, scoring three times, twice off the stick of Draisaitl and once\u00a0through Nugent-Hopkins.<\/p>\n
The Oilers have won three in a row and eight of their past nine games,\u00a0putting them in first place in the Western Conference with the NHL’s best win percentage (.850).<\/p>\n
Edmonton will carry its momentum from its second three-game win streak of the season into Saturday’s meeting at Rogers Place against the Toronto Maple Leafs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDMONTON, AB \u2013\u00a0Not even a Hurricane could stop this Category Five explosion. Led by a pair of incredible…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":942970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,23752],"class_list":["post-942969","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\/942969","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=942969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/942970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=942969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=942969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=942969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}