These Edmonton Oilers built for when the going gets tough in playoffs (2024)

Sixteen wins.

That’s what it takes in the playoffs for a team to raise the Stanley Cup in celebration at the culmination of four best-of-seven elimination rounds.

Article content

But the math gets more convoluted as soon as you factor in how there can be no more than 12 losses at the same time, and no more than three of them can come in any given round.

After all, no playoff path has been trodden without stumbling across some bumps in the road.

Article content

And the chances of the Edmonton Oilers coming into the playoffs expecting to sweep all four rounds by 4-0 margins would have been non-existent. Let’s face it, that was hard enough to do in the regular season when they rallied from a disappointing 3-9-1 start to the season by stringing together 16 consecutive wins to climb back into the playoff picture by January.

This time, they will only be facing opposition from the top half of the standings. And in series form, which tend to take on more of a grudge-match atmosphere than a one-off contest.

So, the question heading into these playoffs was never going to be ‘if’ the Oilers lost, but ‘when?’ And more importantly, how they handle the bounce back, because that’s what it takes to avoid having losses compound and earning yourself a sudden exit from the bracket.

The thing about failure is the more it happens, the more a team finds out what doesn’t work, which gets them pointed more and more in the right direction.

But there is more than baseline experience that goes into a team that has been building traits for an extended playoff run.

Article content

Article content

“I think there’s a lot of them: Composed; mature; competitive,” said Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch. “I think competitive is probably the most important one, wanting to win and doing the right things. And we’ve got a lot of guys doing the right things.

“I think another one would be how tight they are. I think that’s a very tight group that want to do this together. I know there has been some frustration in the past feeling like they could win it all and they’ve gone through some ups and downs. I think that’s just made them stronger.”

And more able to go from down back to up quickly, before a slip turns into a stumble, one bad goal turns into a bad game and one loss turns into two.

“I think that’s all about going through the process,” Oilers captain Connor McDavid said. “We’ve had failures in the playoffs and learned from those. Those two-minute lulls, you’ve got to find a way to get yourself out of them only giving up one, or whatever. You look at the game (Sunday) night in Vancouver, Nashville gives up two in 12 seconds and that’s Game 1.

“So, playoff hockey is lots about momentum and holding it while you have it, wrestling it back when you don’t and eliminating the mistakes to give it away. Those stretches of the game, obviously that’s not what we’re looking for and you’ve got to grab it before it causes too much damage.”

Article content

The L.A. Kings need no reminder of just how easy it is to lose momentum, having fallen to the Oilers in each of the last two previous opening rounds, despite holding the series lead both times. But both times, the Oilers were able to bounce back better.

“That more so just comes with experience. When you talk about maturity, this isn’t our first go-round in this situation, so as that experience goes on and we could even go through the course of the season that we’ve had,” Oilers defenceman Darnell Nurse said. “At the start of the year, the sky was falling and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves and were able to dig ourselves out of it.

“So, with experiences like that there’s going to be highs and lows that come throughout a game, throughout a series in the playoffs and it’s how you handle it. The teams that handle it the best, those are usually the teams that play the longest. So, I think the maturity of the group and the experience of the group is going to be relied upon a lot.”

Article content

When it comes to experience, the Oilers brought in just about as much as they could in one fell swoop with the midseason acquisition of 38-year-old Chicago Blacks outcast Corey Perry, who has already brought a mailbag of grit he’s been delivering to the opposition.

“You can’t get your hopes too high or your hopes too low,” said Perry, who won a Cup early in his career with the Anaheim Ducks and has appeared in the last three Stanley Cup finals with three different teams. “It’s one game at a time. It’s a roller-coaster some nights and momentum swings and it’s the little things in a series that can change a series upside down.

“So, you’ve just got to take one game at a time.”

E-mail: gmoddejonge@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge

Article content