The bad thing about statement games is that sometimes the statement hurts.
Like Saturday night’s 7-3 loss to the Minnesota Wild.
It was yet another piece of evidence in a mounting case against Edmonton’s ability to win a championship this year.
All roads leading to the Stanley Cup Final run through the Central Division’s Triangle of Death — Colorado, Dallas and Minnesota — and Edmonton’s head-to-head records against those teams paints a very disturbing picture.
Zero wins, six losses, most of them ugly. They didn’t just lose all of them; they’ve been destroyed by a combined score of 34-12.
You can never give up on the Oilers until they’ve been eliminated; they’ve earned that right by getting their act together down the stretch and advancing to two-straight finals. And if the Florida Panthers weren’t one of the best teams of the last 30 years, maybe the Oilers own a ring or two.
But that was then, and this is now. And right now they aren’t on the same level as the Avalanche, Stars and Wild. It’s not even close.
They’ve been exposed. Edmonton has done well against middling teams (their last 10 wins have come against teams currently out of a playoff spot), but when they come face-to-face with legitimate power teams, they’re taking some savage beatings — 9-1, 8-3, 5-2 and 7-3 among them.
“It just shows where we need to be,” Oilers defenceman Jake Walman said after Saturday’s humbling defeat. “I guess our team’s not playing perfectly yet, and that’s what we’re working towards.
“I didn’t know (about being 0-6), but it’s a good thing to keep an eye on going forward. It’ll be some fuel for us.”
Fuel? Right now, the Oilers are an electric car on a long stretch of rural Canadian highway in the middle of a -30C storm. They’re moving OK, but the long-term prognosis is a little scary.
Some of the key indicators point to trouble ahead.
They are 24th in the NHL in goals-against per game, their five-on-five scoring is 14th in the league and their penalty killing is 18th. Those are three elements a team needs to count on in the playoffs, and right now the Oilers can’t.
Not yet.
They still rely too heavily on the power play — 37 per cent of their offence (73 of 193 goals) have come with a man advantage or into an empty net (11). And they still rely too heavily on their top five players, with Connor McDavid playing 25 or more minutes in six of the last 11 games and McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Evan Bouchard accounting for 111 of Edmonton’s 193 goals this year. A dozen more from second liner Vasily Podkolzin makes it 123 of 193.
They’re getting by with three-goal third-period comebacks and using their high-end firepower to make lesser opponents fold, but that’s not going to work against deep, veteran contenders.
At the heart of their concerns right now is goaltending that isn’t good enough and careless team defence that only compounds the problem.
The Minnesota game was a microcosm of a season-long concern. Edmonton applied significant pressure offensively and had control of the puck long enough to win. They outshot Minnesota 32-16 over the final 40 minutes. But they were outscored 5-1 over those last two periods because the combination of defensive breakdowns and sub-par goaltending was too much to overcome.
“I thought we gave them too much, too many good looks on our net,” said Walman. “It’s no secret, it’s just dialling in, being a little harder in our zone. And, I mean, that’s the difference between a Grade A and getting the puck out.”
Goalie Tristan Jarry (35)of the Edmonton Oilers, was pulled in the second period in favour of Goalie Connor Ingram (39) while playing the Minnesota Wild at Rogers Place in Edmonton on Saturday, January 31, 2026.
Again With The Goaltending
Here they are, a team that considers itself a Stanley Cup contender, and with 26 games left in the season it still doesn’t know who its starting goaltender is.
That has to be a little unnerving. So does giving up 25 goals in five games and seeing both of your goalies hooked. But Knoblauch still has faith in the Jarry-Connor Ingram tandem, even if there is no clear-cut undisputed No.1 he can ride for seven out of every 10 games.
“There are very few teams in the NHL who can say they have a number one goalie who plays the majority of the games, 70 per cent of the games,” said the coach. “There are only a handful of teams that have that. To answer your question, no, I don’t think we have that goalie.”
Nor do they have, at the moment, the kind of team that can make life easy for whoever is guarding their net.
“I think save percentage is a full-team effort, and it lies on us,” said Walman. “It’s the game of odds. If you give up too much, eventually it’s gonna break. We can only ask for so much (from the goalies). It’s up to us to kind of close the gap.”
E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com
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