Skidding Oilers’ offence goes quiet, wasting Pickard’s strong outing

On a night the Edmonton Oilers got all the saves they could ask for, the team still couldn’t come up with a win.

The Oilers were 2:32 away from blanking the Tampa Bay Lightning 1-0 at Benchmark International Arena, but Nick Paul — playing his first game of the year — became the first Bolt to beat Calvin Pickard in the game to square the affair.

In overtime, Jack Roslovic — who had two OT winners already in his short Oilers tenure — had a golden opportunity to end it. With Tampa goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy already splayed out in his crease to deny an in-close attempt from Zach Hyman, the puck came to Roslovic in the blue paint. The winger immediately tried to flip the puck over Vasilevskiy, but the big Russian kicked up his left pad just enough to make a spectacular save and keep the three-on-three action going.

No sooner had Vasilevskiy denied Roslovic than Tampa broke back the other way, eventually sending Jake Guentzel in alone on Pickard. The Bolts sniper scored his fifth goal in his past three outings to earn his squad a 2-1 win and snuff out any chance Edmonton had of ending the evening on a high.

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And what a high it would have been for this team — playing for the second time in 24 hours and for the sixth straight time on the road — to grind out a victory in a place they’ve now lost 12 of their past 13 trips to.

It was clear from the way Edmonton came flying out of the gate that it desperately wanted to end a two-game losing skid and earn a couple of points, preferably with its first regulation-time victory of November. Leon Draisaitl got the Oilers moving in the right direction when he picked off a brutal clearing attempt by Tampa defenceman Emil Lilleberg and immediately sent a pass to the slot for Trent Frederic to pound home just 92 seconds into the game.

At that point, it seemed Tampa Bay was ripe for the taking. The Lightning were playing without three of their top defencemen — Victor Hedman, Erik Cernak and Ryan McDonagh — and the Oilers certainly created ample opportunities to increase their lead in the first half of the opening frame.

However, after they failed to get another puck past Vasilevskiy, the ice — somewhat predictably — started tilting back towards the Oilers’ end.

If Tampa took control in the middle frame, it was coming at Edmonton in waves by the third. To their credit, though, the Oilers — often maligned for playing shoddy defence much of the year — hung tough and got the kind of goaltending from Pickard that neither he nor starter Stuart Skinner has consistently delivered this year.

In the second frame, Pickard squared up to stop a clean one-timer from Brayden Point in the bumper. In the third, Pickard made a save no less jaw-dropping than the one Vasilevskiy made in OT on Roslovic when he Supermanned across his crease to get a scrap of blocker on a Brandon Hagel attempt from the side of the net.

It was all trending toward the kind of gutsy win that can feel like the start of something for a team. Instead, it was another gut-punch for a .500 club that must reconcile with the fact it has fewer 60-minute victories (four) than its cellar-dwelling Alberta rivals in Calgary (five).

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“There’s a lot of things to be happy about,” Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said after the game. “We’ve been talking about how to play better defensively and better awareness, and just digging in in those areas, and just a lot of good defensive plays tonight. And obviously (Pickard) had a heck of a game, especially in the third period. But you can see (evidence of a) fragile group in the third period. We’re just a shell of ourselves, not wanting to make a mistake and holding on and when you hold on, you just have to defend over and over again. Unfortunately, they score that tying goal and it was too bad because it was a good effort for a lot of guys.”

Certainly, Pickard tops the list of Oilers who showed up to play. Goaltending is a constant subplot with this team and Pickard entered this game with a gruesome .830 save percentage. To say he gave his club a shot to win against Tampa would be an understatement, and he, in turn, felt good about what he saw in front of him.

“I really liked how we played,” Pickard said. “Obviously in the third, they kind of took it to us. They’re a great team as well. They had some good looks. Very unfortunate result.

“We were staying tight, good in the middle, the penalty-kill was good, good sticks, let me see the puck and we kept the goals against down.”

The Oilers, who’ve now played a league-high 10 extra-time affairs, will close out their long trip by visiting the Florida Panthers team that’s got the better of them in the past two Stanley Cup Finals on Saturday night. They won’t land in Sunrise on the high of a win, but there’s certainly something to build on from their near victory in Tampa.

“Just playing with that intensity and that attention to detail, because any team that wins consistently has to be a good defensive team,” Knoblauch said when asked what the team can carry forward. “Yes, you’ve got to be able to score goals, but the most important thing is just keeping the puck out of your net. I feel that if we can play good, solid defensive hockey, that we’ll get our opportunities and we’ll score enough goals that we should win most nights.”

The fact they didn’t on this one, though, makes it all the more critical to finish the job next time out.