CHICAGO — It was the middle of January, a rainy night in a Windy City, against an opponent so faceless that even the man on the front of the Chicago Blackhawks’ sweaters needed a program.
These are the points that can fly away, like a loose Tribune on State St. (that great street). Like a Dave Kingman bomb to left, when the wind is blowing out at Wrigley, if you don’t pay attention.
But despite scoring only two goals that counted — despite a 15-shot attack that fell eight shots below their previous season low of 23 — the Edmonton Oilers quelled the pesky Blackhawks 2-1 in a cheeseburger of a game Tuesday night at the used-to-be-a-Madhouse on Madison.
Ugly? You’d ask that thing in the back of the fridge to dance before you’d take this game out on the floor.
But the beauty comes in the spoils, two points in one of the more foul games the Oilers will play this season.
“That narrative around our group seems to be that we can’t play these tight-checking games,” said Oilers captain Connor McDavid. “But we’re a team that has won 100 games over the last two years, and have won 16 of our last 19 games. We know how to win hockey games, all sorts of different ways.”
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It’s hard to argue with The Boss, whose team has a patience we’ve not seen before. They’ll lose again, of course, but it won’t be because they hit panic mode after 30 minutes of scoreless hockey.
Those days are gone. Or so it appears.
“You could easily sit here in each intermission thinking, ‘We should be smoking these guys. Blowing them out by five goals.’ But we just kind of kind of stuck to our process,” said defenceman Brett Kulak. “We stayed the course; we didn’t get too out of control mentally. We just played our game throughout, and Stu gave us a great game.”
Stuart Skinner went from being sneaky good to downright awesome as he stoned Chicago in the final minutes. The Oilers only gave up 26 shots, while having two of their own goals disallowed.
Still, against a decimated Blackhawks lineup chock-full of AHL call-ups, even some ‘Hawks fans had shown up to see McDavid and Leon Draisaitl put on a show.
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Each scored once — that was the show.
“We kind of just found a way to win,” McDavid said. “They’re banged up, a young, excited lineup. Those are sometimes the toughest games to play. A little bit scrambly, a little bit all over the place.”
“We were just good enough to get a win. Not a Picasso, by any means,” said coach Kris Knoblauch. “They’re all good wins. It’s an 82-game schedule. It’s hard to get up and play beautifully every game.”
Edmonton now has its second eight-game winning streak of the season, and also a six-game road win streak. They’ve won five straight over Chicago, their first 5-game win streak vs. the Blackhawks since 2003-2004, as two teams take turns near the top of the tables.
Edmonton had two goals called back: a goalie interference call on Zach Hyman that cost McDavid a goal and an offside by Draisaitl that nixed a McDavid-to-Hyman tap-in.
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The former seemed straightforward enough, though the latter was not — by far the longest review of the season for Edmonton. It was deemed Draisaitl was offside, and did not have control of the puck as he brought it into the zone.
“If it takes you 15 minutes to determine if it’s offside or not, it probably doesn’t really matter,” said McDavid, exaggerating by about 10 minutes or so. But we get his point.
“You zoom in, you zoom in, you keep zooming in until you can’t zoom in anymore, and I guess it’s offside,” he said, laughing at the situation as he spoke. “That was a big call. (A 3-1 goal) would have really, really hurt them. I thought it should have been onside. The argument of possession, that whole debate can start again.”
Of course, the Oilers were stung in the ’22 Conference Final when it was deemed Colorado’s Cale Makar had puck possession on a sketchy offside review. They’ll always be sensitive to that rule in Northern Alberta, and to be fair, like so many things when it comes to reviews and the work of the Department of Player Safety, nobody in the game is able to predict an outcome anymore.
“The NHL wants it to be clear and obvious?” McDavid said. “That one certainly wasn’t clear and obvious.”
