Corey Perry: The speech that saved the Edmonton Oilers season

Calgary Herald

18 hours ago

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We might never know exactly what Corey Perry told his Edmonton Oilers teammates in his first-intermission sermon Thursday night, but it struck a chord with every player in the room.
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And it might have just won the Oilers a Stanley Cup. At the very least, it prevented a catastrophic meltdown that would have all but ended Edmonton's dreams of a championship.
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They were being roasted and embarrassed in the first period of a pivotal Game 4 Thursday. They took three-straight minor penalties, gave up two power play goals and were trailing 3-0 at the first intermission. The shots were 17-7 and the high-danger chances were 13-1.
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After a 6-1 loss in Game 3, this was shaping up to be one the most brutal Oilers playoff collapses of all time. The Stanley Cup was gone.
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Then, whatever happened in Edmonton's room during the first intermission might have changed the course of their history. It certainly changed the course of the game.
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When it was over, the Oilers all pointed to Perry's pep talk.
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'That's a guy who everybody in the room respects so much, he's been through it all,' said Oilers forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. 'When he speaks up like that, it means a lot, and I thought we did a good job of responding.'
The response was the Oilers at their cold-blooded best.
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They came back. You had to see it to believe it, but they got up from 3-0 down in Florida's own building, with everyone on the planet calling them chokers, and beat the Panthers 5-4 in overtime.
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Instead of being down 3-1 with hope fading fast, it's now a best-of-three with two games, if necessary, in Edmonton.
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'It wasn't wisdom,' joked Perry, before the Oilers caught their flight home for Game 5 on Saturday night. 'Honestly, we just had to realize where we were in the moment and look at ourselves in the mirror, how we were playing, what we were doing. That's pretty much all it was.
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'We looked flat, we looked like we were off. It's one of those things where things were said, and it's nice that we came away with the win.'
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To be clear, the Oilers turned it around because they have the kind of guys who live for this kind of stuff. They've come back after being counted out so many times that only a fool counts them out anymore.
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Game 4 is always the most important game in any series — the difference between 2-2 and 3-1 is almost always the difference in the series. That this group hasn't lost one (10-0) in the last three years speaks to their ability to dig in when it counts and rise to the moment.