EDMONTON \u2014 The Edmonton Oilers, facing elimination, will have Connor McDavid in the lineup.<\/p>\n
The NHL\u2019s scoring champion took part in warmups on Tuesday night before Game 5 against the Anaheim Ducks, who hold a 3-1 lead in their first-round Stanley Cup playoff series. The Oilers previously described McDavid\u2019s status as a game-time decision, but he is listed on the official lineup sheet as a starter.<\/p>\n
McDavid appeared to injure his ankle in Edmonton\u2019s Game 2 loss after getting tied up with teammate Mattias Ekholm. The Ducks have beaten Edmonton in three consecutive games, and while McDavid has produced points, he\u2019s clearly not at 100 percent. He took what coach Kris Knoblauch called a \u201cmaintenance day\u201d on Saturday in Anaheim ahead of Game 4, instead of practicing, and also missed morning skate on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Jason Dickinson, whose availability had been a question, also will be part of the Oilers\u2019 Game 5 roster.<\/p>\n
Asked about the state of his health on Sunday, McDavid responded by saying the Oilers \u201cfeel we\u2019re all doing the best we can out there.\u201d Cameras have captured him wincing on Edmonton\u2019s bench, his lateral movement has appeared to be lacking and Knoblauch passed on a few different opportunities to downplay the severity of the injury. From Game 2 onward, the Oilers have been outscored 5-2 and outshot 29-22 in McDavid\u2019s five-on-five minutes.<\/p>\n
After tightening up for the last 10 games of the regular season, the Oilers are having across-the-board defensive struggles against a younger, faster, offensively dynamic opponent. Anaheim has outscored the Oilers 17-11 over the last three games, outshot them 105-89 and scored five power-play goals. Edmonton, meanwhile, has blown two-goal leads in consecutive games and changed goalies twice, going from Connor Ingram to Tristan Jarry for Game 4 and then reinstalling Ingram for Game 5<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, injuries are affecting how we\u2019re playing,\u201d Knoblauch said. \u201cObviously, there\u2019s some, but there\u2019s a lot of teams that have injuries and they still continue to play well. I see some of the things that we\u2019re doing right now weren\u2019t the things that we were doing at the end of the season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve seen the best out of our group even though there\u2019s some circumstances and some guys that are not 100 percent, but I still think we got a lot more.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDMONTON \u2014 The Edmonton Oilers, facing elimination, will have Connor McDavid in the lineup. The NHL\u2019s scoring champion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290756,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,824,165,164,2070,404],"class_list":["post-290755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-ducks","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-edmonton-oilers","tag-nhl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}