From making Darnell Nurse a forward, to firing the coach and everything in between, Edmonton Oilers fans are already seething with frustration early in the 2024-25 season, and rightly so.
Coming off a Game 7 loss in the Stanley Cup Finals, the expectations for the start of the year were the opposite of what it’s been — an 0-3, lifeless skid losing to the Winnipeg Jets, Chicago Blackhawks and on Sunday night, their provincial rival Calgary Flames. The first BoA of the year seemed like it was going to get off on the right foot.
Just 1:16 into the game, Jeff Skinner opened up the scoring after being bumped up to the top line alongside Connor McDavid and Zach Hyman. “Finally,” the collective fan base thought. Jokes on them, as after 60, the Oilers looked up at the scoreboard and saw a 4-1 loss.
“I’m sure there’s lots of ways to explain it, but ultimately, it hasn’t been good enough, ultimately it hasn’t been good enough, I’ve said that numerous times,” said Oilers captain Connor McDavid after the loss. “Up and down the lineup, myself first and foremost, everyone can be better and everyone will be better.
“I think it starts (with) your habits in practice. I think we can be better there, too — be better all over.”
Now outscored 15-3 through the first three games of the season, the Oilers look nothing like they hoped. Some of it falls on the organization as a whole, as the team had a hapless, boring pre-season in which they went 3-5, getting outscored at a two-to-one clip. While there’s benefit in seeing what you have in players from an organizational perspective, wouldn’t it be fair to say that for a team like these Oilers, getting ready to go for night one of the regular season is more important?
After all, this is a Cup-or-bust team with aspirations of finding that extra goal in Game 7. They’re not the Oilers of yesteryear wallowing at the bottom of the standings.
What’s clear now, three games into the season, is that the team is nowhere near where their game needs to be.
It’s not like they can’t turn it on, either. This isn’t a bunch of players who don’t know what they’re doing in the big picture. After all, they rebounded last year in a big way, and overcame series deficits to the Vancouver Canucks, Dallas Stars and the Florida Panthers, coming back from a 3-0 hole in the Cup Finals to force a winner-take-all.
“I think if we had the answer, we wouldn’t be sitting here at 0-3,” said Oilers defenceman Darnell Nurse. “It’s up to us as a veteran group, guys who have been in different spots in this league, to work our way out of it.
“Every time we’ve been in a tough spot here over the last few years, we’ve put our heads down and just worked and take it one day at a time, and that’s the approach we’ve gotta take.”
The beauty of the sport of hockey is that the numbers are still well on the Oilers’ side. Regular seasons are 82 games long, and the final standings aren’t decided for months and months and months. Neither are the final stat counts, which show the Oilers scoring on an unfathomably low 3.23 percent of their shots, the lowest in the entire league.
They shot at an 10.6 percent clip last year, and as Oilersnation’s NHL_Sid pointed out, no team has ever shot lower than 6.9 percent over a full year. The Oilers, even stuck in the Decade of Darkness, saw their lowest shooting percentage at 8.3 percent in 2014-15. If through these three games the Oilers shot at the same 10.6 percent rate they did last year, they already would’ve scored 10 goals on the year.
It will come, but that doesn’t mean these early days don’t sting.
Edmonton’s October schedule will continue Tuesday hosting the Philadelphia Flyers, before a two-game road trip takes them to Nashville next Thursday, and Dallas next Saturday.
