The Edmonton Oilers begin a four-game road trip Sunday at the Detroit Red Wings absolutely brimming with confidence after their most recent performance.
Before hitting the road, the Oilers beat the Pittsburgh Penguins 4-0 on Friday in a dominating performance from start to finish, looking very much like the squad that reached the Stanley Cup Final last season.
While thumping the Penguins, the Oilers outshot the opposition by a 50-27 margin, scored on the power play and shut the door defensively to preserve Stuart Skinner’s first shutout of the season.
“If you do that, you’re going to get results eventually,” defenseman Mattias Ekholm said. “It was just a matter of the puck going in, and at the end of the day, it sure did in a good way. We’ve just got to keep it rolling.”
The Oilers have managed only three victories in their first eight games, so the test will be to prove that result was not a one-off. However, the execution of their game plan was near perfect.
“Start to finish, we played a really solid game,” Skinner said. “It started with the defensive zone, and then from there, we were able to capitalize on some offense. And that’s normally how it starts for us. When we’re solid in the D zone, we get a lot of chances. … Just an amazing team effort.”
On top of the victory, the Oilers had a couple of players hit the scoresheet after surprisingly slow starts to the campaign.
“(Viktor) Arvidsson and (Zach) Hyman played a really good game. … They had so many scoring chances and it’s only a matter of time” coach Kris Knoblauch said. “When you have that many chances, it’s got to go in soon.”
The Red Wings return home after their three-game winning streak was snapped in a 5-3 road loss to the Buffalo Sabres on Saturday afternoon.
“We would have loved to have some bounces with us,” said forward Lucas Raymond, who scored his first goal of the season. “At the same time, we think we didn’t quite reach our level and maybe didn’t earn those bounces. We had looks, but just keep building.”
As disappointed as they are about the loss, the Red Wings do have positives to glean from the affair. Detroit erased a 3-1 deficit, drawing even with Raymond’s short-handed goal just past the midway point, but could not find the equalizer after falling behind again.
The Red Wings came close when Patrick Kane rang a shot off the post in the final minute, seconds before the Sabres sealed the win with an empty-net goal.
“I think there’s a lot of positives we can take away,” forward Moritz Seider said. “We were one post off from going into overtime, so that’s obviously good stuff. We don’t want to go fighting in overtime. We want to play a good 60 minutes, and I think we can learn something out here.”
However, the Red Wings can ill afford to give up a lead to the high-octane Oilers, and they know it. Of utmost importance will be to build on how they finished the game.
“I didn’t like our first (period),” coach Derek Lalonde said. “Some wall battles that we lost, and they ended up with a little bit too much zone time, then, obviously, the turnover that led to the transition goal. … After that, over the last 40 minutes, we cleaned some of that up.”
