Professional sports has its own orthodoxy.
When the home team is losing, it is incumbent upon every diehard fan to suddenly turn into Frank Costanza from Seinfeld, and next thing you know Festivus and time for the “airing of grievances.”
With the Edmonton Oilers now sitting at 3-7-1, there are plenty of grievances.
But during stretches like this we spend so much time talking about what went wrong that we seldom get to mention what went right.
And there were many things that went right on Wednesday night at Rogers Place.
Yet on a night when the Oilers needed their special teams to live up to the name, the penalty kill surrendered two goals — including a real groaner late in the game — and the power play scored only once in four tries.
With their team now mired in a quicksand and sinking fast, fans will have pointed questions about the coach, complaints about referees, and there will be much talk about trades and calls for reinforcements from the American Hockey League.
One point that shouldn’t be up for debate is this: Last night the best hockey player in the world brought the reigning champions to town to face off against the most exciting hockey player in the world.
The best player won. Just as he did last week, when the game was in his building.
So let the record show that Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins came into Edmonton and defeated Connor McDavid’s Oilers by a score of 3-2. That’s four games over the past two seasons in which the Penguins have beaten the Oilers by a single goal.
Oilers fans are choked because their team has not lived up to the pre-season hype, after so many so-called experts predicted great things this season.
Great things may yet happen. But they’re getting harder to imagine with each passing day.
The Penguins played a safe, boring road period for the first 20 minutes. That’s what championship teams are supposed to do. They lulled the crowd to sleep.
The second period was when all the cool stuff happened.
Patric Hornqvist scored a power play goal to put the visitors up 1-0.
Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who is turning into the team’s best face-off man, banged home a rebound off the boards for a power-play goal of his own to even the score. It was his fifth goal of the season. A rejuvenated second line. That’s a good thing, right there.
Then came that sublime moment in the second period, when the most exciting player in the world picked up a loose puck that ricocheted off a referee in the Penguins’ zone, then turned two defencemen inside-out and fed a perfect pass to Leon Draisaitl for what amounted to an open-net goal.
In the wink of eye, the latest McDavid magic put the Oilers up 2-1.
Signs of life
Things didn’t end up that way. So this might be a good time to mention that the Oilers lost another close game to the best team in the NHL. A team captained by the best player we’ve seen in a decade. A team that also has Evgeni Malkin, who may be the best second-line centre in the league, and Phil Kessel, and Kris Letang, one of the best defencemen in the league.
“I thought tonight was a pretty competitive night against the Stanley Cup champs,” Oilers coach Todd McLellan said, when he was mostly done talking about what went wrong.
“We can talk about what we look like and what we feel like, but … we’ve got to win games.”
It is an unwritten rule that players and coaches on the losing side rarely talk about positive things. They say what they’re supposed to say.
What they can never say is, “Boy, was that a exciting hockey game, or what?”
It’s too bad. Because it really was.
Both the coach and the captain thought the Oilers’ new power-play units — McDavid and Draisaitl were split up — showed signs of life.
Despite a penalty kill that has been on life support all season, halfway through the second the Oilers managed to survive a stretch where they were down two men for almost two minutes.
‘We give the line up’
Then the best player in the world joined the conversation. Crosby gathered the puck, broke in on goal and fed a perfect pass to Connor Sheary to make it 2-2 with less than a minute left in the second.
That late goal hurt, as late goals so often do.
“We’ve got to find a way to switch those timely goals around,” McDavid said afterwards.
Both goaltenders played well throughout the game. Cam Talbot faced 30 shots and Matt Murray for the Penguins faced 37.
The Oilers’ fate was sealed when Nugent-Hopkins took an interference penalty at 12:04 of the third. Nineteen seconds later, four Oilers players — Adam Larsson, Darnell Nurse, Zack Kassian and Drake Caggiula — decided to cover the same 100 square feet of ice above the face-off circles. Malkin promptly slipped around the outside of that too-tight box and scored what proved to be the game winner.
“The last one was the one that was disappointing,” McLellan said, “We’re in position. We have an opportunity to hold the line. We don’t. We give the line up. And then we get skated on the entry. That’s a very preventable penalty-kill situation for me.”
The Oilers play the New Jersey Devils on Friday and the Detroit Red Wings on Sunday afternoon before heading back out on the road.