The first 10 minutes and five seconds of the first period were good.
The remaining 49:55 of the Edmonton Oilers' performance in their eventual 6-2 loss Tuesday to the Anaheim Ducks were not.
The Ducks, who had been outshot 7-1 midway through the opening frame, suddenly grabbed momentum after Leon Draisaitl opened the scoring on the power play for a 1-0 Oilers lead and tied the game two minutes later.
“After that, we’re a fragile team, and when things aren’t going well, we lose our game,” Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch told media after the game.
“I still thought our start was exactly how we needed to play, and guys were ready, then a little bit of adversity and we were a shell of ourselves.”
Anaheim ran up the score to 6-1 before Connor McDavid’s PP marker early in the third capped the goal parade.
The Ducks improved their record to 27-26-7 to sit six points out of a playoff wild-card spot, while the Oilers dropped to 35-22-4 and remained in second place in the Pacific Division.
Heading into Tuesday’s home game, the Oilers were coming off a win in Carolina to salvage a road trip in which they’d lost the previous four games.
But over the last baker’s-dozen of games – stretching back before the two-week 4 Nations Face-Off break – they haven’t played nearly as dominantly as they had for about a six-week stretch from late November to mid January, since then eking out wins against teams well below them in the standings and outright losing to better ones.
And while the Ducks are an improved squad this season over other recent ones, them piling up the goals in the usually hostile confines of Rogers Place came as a surprise.
Knoblauch and co. didn’t have answers as to why the Oilers are experiencing what the coach called “a tough time in the season.”
“This is usually a team that can handle any amount of adversity,” Knoblauch said Tuesday night. “They’ve done it numerous times last year, this year.”
When asked from where the fragility seems to have crept in, he said “that’s a good question,” eventually offering he’d like his players “to defend the dangerous areas of the ice a lot better than we did” and adding after Wednesday’s practice that he wants to see improved play defending off the rush five-on-five by both forwards and defencemen.
“One is forwards being out of position, so giving up odd-man rushes, not back pressuring hard enough to make it easier for the defence, and then also on the defencemen giving up the line so the opposition can make those plays,” Knoblauch said.
Forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said he didn’t know why the Oilers didn’t have a response to the Ducks' push and have seemed deflated in recent games.
“It’s something that we’ve talked about,” Nugent-Hopkins said after the game. “We need to address it a little bit more, but we know that’s not the way that we do things.”
This is usually a team that can handle any amount of adversity.
— Kris Knoblauch
Draisaitl, the star Oilers centre who’s leading the National Hockey League in goal-scoring with 45, said Wednesday that “a lot of individual mistakes” have led to collective ones in the team’s recent slump.
(We’ve) got to get back to prioritizing that part of the game ... get back to defending the way that we know we’re capable of," he told media.
The Oilers play the second of a three-game homestand Thursday against the Montreal Canadiens.
