Trailing 2-0 in the series against the LA Kings, the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs have not gone to plan for the Edmonton Oilers.
After making it to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final in 2024, the Oilers have been unable to recapture their previous playoff form in the first round, coming up short in California, while failing to silence the Kings’ now infamous harmonica anthem.
The series shifts back to Edmonton for Game 3 on Friday, with the Oilers looking to claw their way back.
On Thursday’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, Tyler Yaremchuk and Frank Seravalli dove into why it might already be too late for Connor McDavid and the Oilers.
Yaremchuk: I think there would have been a world where, if LA had won a couple of tight games… you would have been like, ‘Okay, they’re up to nothing.’ After watching that beatdown last night, it’s hard to envision a world where the Oilers just snap back to their Stanley Cup form at any point in this series.
Seravalli: We’ve had 84 games of this team being a mostly average team. They’re in the second quartile in goals for and goals against, their goaltending obviously has not been nearly good enough, and they’re without their top defender in Mattias Ekholm .
I’m not making excuses, but I also just don’t think that you could snap your fingers, and all of a sudden this team would revert back to dominating the playoffs and take over because they got to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final last year. They don’t have the same roster.
There’s six guys from Game 7 last year that aren’t here, and it’s not just Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway. You’re getting a dose of this series of Warren Foegele. Ryan McLeod is in Buffalo, and Cody Ceci is in Dallas. That’s six guys. This team is not anywhere near as good as last year’s team, and that’s really the true story of the Oilers.
It’s not just the issues that they’ve had so far in this series, where they’ve been crushed by the Kings’ power play – who saw that coming after they went over last year – but that this team is not the same Oilers team from before. It’s older, it’s slower, and they’re just not as good.
You can catch the rest of the segment and the full episode here…
