For the third time in four years, the Edmonton Oilers will play in the Western Conference Finals.
On Wednesday night , the Oilers punched their ticket to the next round, defeating the Vegas Golden Knights 1-0 in overtime. Let’s take a look at the one goal that pushed the Oilers one step closer to the Stanley Cup.
Through 67 minutes, both the Knights and Oilers played defensively stifling hockey. Just over seven minutes into the first overtime period, Vasily Podkolzin entered the zone and passed it far side to Leon Draisaitl. The German found Darnell Nurse at the point, one-timing it on the net. It was Kasperi Kapanen of all players who banged in the puck during the scramble, sending the Oilers to the Western Conference Finals.
Takeaways…
Nine years, four months, and nine days ago, Kasperi Kapanen scored the biggest goal of his career in overtime, giving Team Finland the win in the 2016 World Junior Gold Medal game. Well, that was the biggest goal of his career until Wednesday’s game. Who saw Kapanen scoring the series-clinching goal?
Stuart Skinner deserves an apology. Were his first three postseason games this year good? Absolutely not. But in his past two games, he’s saved 47 shots, 24 of which came in this game. He looked steady back there, hopefully he can continue it heading into the Western Conference Finals.
There are fun one-goal games and incredibly boring one-goal games. If this were a regular season game, it’d probably fall in the latter category because both teams played a defence-first game. With that said, Game 5 fell into the “fun one-goal game” just because of how tense it was. If you’re wondering, that was the 52nd playoff game that went to overtime that ended in a score of 1-0.
The last time the Oilers lost when they had an opportunity to eliminate a team in a game that wasn’t Game 7 was all the way back in 2006 when they lost in Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals against the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. That streak didn’t end in this game, as the Oilers are now 9-2 when they have a chance to eliminate a team in the Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl era.
It may be a few days before the Oilers know who their next opponent is. It’ll either be the Winnipeg Jets or the Dallas Stars, with the latter having a 3-1 series lead over the fellow Canadian team. Hopefully, that goes to seven games to give Mattias Ekholm some more time to recover.
Until next series!
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