That was cruel.
Like, waving a steak dinner in front of a starving man cruel.
There aren’t many teams in the NHL that need a win more than the Edmonton Oilers right now and Thursday night in Tampa Bay they could practically taste it.
Fans have been waiting all season for the Oilers to show signs of life, signs of fight, and they showed it against the Lightning. Playing their second of back-to-backs and third game in four nights, the Oilers woke the gritty, hard-working, stingy playoff team that’s been hibernating for six weeks.
Trent Frederic scored.
Darnell Nurse stepped out of his comfort zone and got in a scrap.
Calvin Pickard was pitching a shutout.
The penalty kill was three-for-three.
The defence wasn’t giving up anything easy.
There was no long second-period lull.
Everything was coming up Oilers.
They scored 90 seconds into the first period and guarded that lead ferociously for 56 hard, inspired minutes. Then, just 2:32 from the finish line, on a play that was fractions of an inch away from being offside, Nick Paul scored to tie it 1-1.
And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Jack Roslovic, who’s had one of the hottest sticks on the team, missed a three-foot tap-in that would have won it in overtime, allowing Tampa to take it the length of the ice and score.
And all that hard work ended up on the scrap heap.
Brutal.
“I really like how we played,” said Pickard, who stopped 33 of 35 shots. “Obviously, in the third, they took it to us (shots were 14-4). It’s probably the most shots I’ve had all year but probably the least amount of big chances that we gave up.
“We were staying tight, we were good in the middle, penalty kill was good. We kept them the goals against down.
“It’s not the easiest back-to-back coming from Washington, but right from the get go we had a good game. Unfortunate result.”
Unfortunate is one way of putting it. The winning play was a head-shaking, eye-rolling punch in the gut. With Tampa goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy flat on his stomach off to the side of the crease, and the front of the net wide open, and nobody covering Roslovic, all he had to do was not shoot the puck anywhere but into the lone goal pad.
He shot it into the goal pad and the ensuing turnover led to a game-winning two-on-one the other way.
There have been so many games this year when you felt the Oilers got what they deserved, or looked mediocre in a win, but this was a game in which they might have deserved better.
“There are a lot of things to be happy about,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch. “We’ve been talking about how to play better defensively. I saw a lot of good defensive plays and Picks had a heck of a game, especially in the third period.”
It needs to be said, of course, that the Lightning were seriously wounded coming into this game. If you can imagine what the Oilers would look like if they went into a game without Mattias Ekholm, Evan Bouchard and Nurse, that’s what the Lightning were dealing with without their top three defencemen — Victor Hedman, Ryan McDonagh and Erik Cernak.
Even so, the feisty Lightning were exactly what the Oilers, who’ve been lacking emotion all year, needed. And it’s and what they should be in for more of Saturday in Florida. This was tough, angry hockey where every inch of ice had to be fought for.
It was as close as the Oilers have looked to their old selves all season.
Even when Edmonton’s legs were getting heavy six games into the seven-game road trip and the Lightning shifted into another gear in the third period, the Oilers were finding a way to win.
Right up until they lost.
“You could see a fragile group in the third period,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch. “We were just a shell of ourselves, not wanting to make a mistake and just holding on, and you just have to defend over and over again. It’s too bad because it was a good effort from a lot of guys.”
Pickard’s rebound
Pickard came into the game with an .830 save percentage and needed to come up big behind a tired team. He did.
“My back was against the wall,” he said. “I needed to have a good game here tonight and I did. It’s just an unfortunate result. But the team really made it easier on me. Playing good defence makes my job easier.
“I need to keep building off that. I need to keep throwing that game out there.”
Nurse shows grit
Fresh off a two-goal game in Washington, Nurse was front and centre when somebody needed to step up for Jake Walman after he got crushed by six-foot-nine, 242-pound Curtis Douglas. Nurse challenged the big guy, but they both lost their balance, and the fight never really got going.
Still, it’s something we haven’t seen much from Nurse, who wound up getting two, five and 10 for instigating, just a terrible call in a fight in which both guys dropped their gloves at the same time and squared off.
E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com
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