Nightmare on Oilers Street as Panthers plunge a dagger into Edmonton
If all the first periods in this Stanley Cup Final were pieced together to make a bad horror movie — Panther Mauling I: Bleeding The Oil — Edmonton would be the clueless teenagers at summer camp and Florida would be the guy in the mask waiting to plunge home another machete.
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Saturday's win in Game 5 makes it three swipes down, one to go.
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In what must seem like a recurring nightmare, the Panthers once again had the Oilers bleeding badly by the first intermission.
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This time it was 2-0 and, if you're scoring at home, that makes 11 first-period goals by the Panthers in this series (Edmonton has four, three of them in one game) and four-straight games in which Florida scored first.
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And while the Oilers are one of the NHL's great comeback teams, you can't spot the Panthers two or three goals every game and expect to get away with it.
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It cost them Game 5 and it's quite possibly costing a Stanley Cup.
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With Saturday's 5-2 decision at Rogers Place, Florida has pushed Edmonton to the brink of an outcome too painful to even comprehend: Losing a second-straight Cup Final to Matthew Tkachuk and the Panthers.
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They're trailing 3-2, heading back to Florida and on the verge of having to spend another long summer mourning the loss of a championship that was close enough to touch.
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After weak and tepid starts to Games 3 and 4, in which they were down 2-0 and 3-0, the Oilers came out with some jump to begin Game 5, but it didn't last. Close calls from Connor Brown and Connor McDavid very nearly put Edmonton in front in the first three minutes, but after that they settled into their usual opening 20 sag.
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They had just three shots on net, the last of which came from Darnell Nurse at 8:50.
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The Panthers, meanwhile, took their usual lead. Brad Marchand juked Mattias Ekholm off a centre-ice faceoff and walked down main street to score on a breakaway at 9:12 and Sam Bennett made it 2-0 after more neutral zone confusion by the Oilers at 18:06.
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Florida looked faster, hungrier and better.
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But, after becoming the first team in 106 years to come back from a 3-0 deficit on the road in a Stanley Cup Final two nights ago, a two-goal deficit with 40 minutes to go was nothing to the Oilers.
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This time the Panthers were holding up. A couple of Florida penalties levelled the playing field a bit in the second period, but Edmonton failed to make any inroads and it was a two-goal deficit with 20 minutes to go.
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Then it was Marchand again. This time it was off a defensive zone faceoff and this time he raced the length of the ice and undressed Jake Walman. And it was a three-goal deficit with 15 minutes to go.
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Vancouver Sun
21 minutes ago
- Vancouver Sun
Some things to worry about before the Edmonton Oilers play Game 6
This comeback team needs another one. The biggest of their lives, in fact. Trailing 3-2 in the Stanley Cup Final after their second dismal outing in three games, the Edmonton Oilers will have to summon every ounce of fight they have left, get up off the deck, and force a Game 7. Will they? The Panthers were first to every puck and won every battle Saturday against an Oilers team that seemed overwhelmed, unable to find an answer for wave after wave of Florida attack. Letting the Oilers come back from 3-0 down on the road in Game 4 should have broken the Panthers. It should have signalled a shift in momentum. Playoff defeats don't get more devastating than that. Instead, it's starting to look like that was Edmonton's last gasp, a once-in-a-century comeback sandwiched in between 6-1 and 5-2 losses. Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. It doesn't look good. But the Oilers have 14 wins in the playoffs, eight of which have been comebacks. It's a team that rebounded from 0-2 down in the Los Angeles series and became the first road team in 106 years to win a Stanley Cup Final game after trailing 3-0. You're out of your mind if you don't think they can't come back and win it all. Playing a stinker, giving everyone very good reason to believe they're done, and then coming back to silence the doubters is what they do. Whether they can do it against one of the best teams of the last 30 years is the question. Some other things to worry about before Game 6: • At no other point in the series did it look like the Oilers were going to lose, but the way they withered and wilted in Game 5, on the heels of a 6-1 defeat in Game 3 and falling behind 3-0 in the first period of Game 4, suggests the Panthers are pulling away. Is Florida just the better team? You can't go there yet. There is still a Game 6 to be played, but things are trending in the wrong direction. • The slow start thing is inexcusable. This is the Stanley Cup Final, you have to be ready to go, and at the first intermission of the last three games Edmonton trailed 2-0, 3-0 and 2-0. Anyone can play with urgency when the situation is desperate, but champions manufacture that urgency at the opening faceoff. • Did the Oilers come out as timidly as they did in Game 5 because they were afraid of taking more early penalties? • Sam Bennett and Brad Marchand have been better than Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl and it's tipping the balance. Bennett and Marchand have 11 goals in the series while Draisaitl (four) and McDavid (one) have five. Marchand and Bennet are plus 11 in the series, McDavid and Draisaitl are minus six. • It's a shame if Corey Perry loses yet another Stanley Cup Final. He shows up and plays hard every night. That a 40-year-old is second on the team in playoff goals isn't a good look on everyone else. • The Oilers miss Zach Hyman big time. They need somebody who can score the kind of goals that Perry does, through tough work around the front of the net. The power play — 4-for-23 (17.3 per cent) in the Final isn't getting the job done and could use his help. • Did practising on a pair of off-days between Game 3 and 4 do more harm than good? Rest is a weapon in the playoffs and taking one of those days off might have been wise. After a schedule of Game 3, practice day, practice day, Game 4, travel day, Game 5, the Oilers looked tired on Saturday. • The Oilers like to think they're deep, but Florida's depth is out of this world. Florida's third line (Eetu Luostarinen, Anton Lundell and Brad Marchand) has 55 points in the playoffs. Edmonton's third line has 13. • And where would two of Edmonton's top six wingers from Saturday, Connor Brown and Vasily Podkolzin fit in Florida's top six of Carter Verhaeghe, Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart, Evan Rodrigues, Sam Bennett and Matthew Tkachuk? • It doesn't matter who the Oilers start in goal in Game 6. Sergei Bobrovsky is better. And Edmonton's team defence and puck management isn't helping. Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard gave up 14 goals in the last three games and none of them were especially weak. • If Stuart Skinner isn't going to be your Stanley Cup-winning goalie, where are the Oilers going to find room under the cap to spend another $5 or $6 million to shore up that position next year • Did somebody say salary cap? When McDavid and Evan Bouchard get paid, it's going to be even tougher for the Oilers to build the kind of depth Florida has. • If the Panthers close this out for three straight trips to the Stanley Cup Final and back-to-back wins, they will go down, rightfully so, as one of the best teams in the salary cap era. What, then, will the Oilers go down as? E-mail: rtychkowski@ Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don't miss the news you need to know — add and to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters . You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. The Edmonton Journal | The Edmonton Sun
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27 minutes ago
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Some things to worry about before the Edmonton Oilers play Game 6
Article content Letting the Oilers come back from 3-0 down on the road in Game 4 should have broken the Panthers. It should have signalled a shift in momentum. Playoff defeats don't get more devastating than that. Instead, it's starting to look like that was Edmonton's last gasp, a once-in-a-century comeback sandwiched in between 6-1 and 5-2 losses. It doesn't look good. But the Oilers have 14 wins in the playoffs, eight of which have been comebacks. It's a team that rebounded from 0-2 down in the Los Angeles series and became the first road team in 106 years to win a Stanley Cup Final game after trailing 3-0. You're out of your mind if you don't think they can't come back and win it all. Playing a stinker, giving everyone very good reason to believe they're done, and then coming back to silence the doubters is what they do. Whether they can do it against one of the best teams of the last 30 years is the question.
