Oilers’ Pickard ‘dealing with it’ after Skinner trade, loss to Canadiens

MONTREAL — For the past couple of weeks, Calvin Pickard and Stuart Skinner had noticeably lingered over their post-game embraces.

It was some new, weird level of the post-game goalie love. Part, “Good game, buddy,” and part, “It’s been nice knowing you.”

It was as if they knew that their tandem would soon be ripped apart by trade. Like they were sending out some kind of sign, some portent of a crease-changing deal to come.

And when Skinner got dealt away on Friday, you could almost hear the Oilers fan base: “We KNEW it!”

Well, as it turns out, they didn’t know jack. Because the goalies didn’t know jack.

“No,” admitted Pickard after a 4-1 loss in Montreal on Sunday. “We were just screwing around with everybody.”

Seriously?!

“Ya,” he confessed. “Because after the first (hug) that happened — it was a long one, because I was so mad at letting that goal in with four seconds left, and we won 9-4 — and then you guys read into it too much. Then we were screwing around there after the next two wins.

“It doesn’t look like we were screwing around, obviously, with (a trade) happening. But that was the truth.”

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So perhaps, we’ll submit, the night Pickard had in Montreal Sunday was karma, faced with four separate breakaways and the Sisyphean task of holding his team in against the Canadiens as long as humanly possible.

It’s a lonely life being a career backup, always getting the second game of back-to-backs, backstopping the tired team that lapses after winning the night before. The backup can’t leave practice early, and even when he doesn’t play in a couple of weeks, he’s expected to arrive sharp and ready, because nobody wants to hear a list of excuses from the No. 2 ‘tendy.

“It happens, yeah,” Pickard admitted. “I haven’t played in 10 days, so it has its own challenges, for sure. But I’ve done it for years now. It can get frustrating, but it’s the hand I’m dealt. I just gotta go out and deal with it.”

And, in the end, Pickard did lose his partner Skinner. He’ll see him again in Pittsburgh, where the Oilers and Penguins meet Tuesday in what should be a Tristan Jarry versus Skinner showdown.

“Obviously, I’ve been through this. I’ve been in pro hockey for a long time,” Pickard said of the trade. “It’s definitely felt weird. You know, Skins and Cooley (Brett Kulak) just leave in the blink of an eye. Two big parts of our team since I’ve been here. Two good friends.”

On a night when all the top Oilers delivered C-minus performances, there was Pickard, “dealing with it.” Standing on his head in a losing cause.

“We were forcing it,” said head coach Kris Knobauch, whose team had taken nine of its last 10 possible points heading into Montreal. “The (four) breakaways we gave up were just puck management, just trying things in the offensive zone where we should have just put pucks in a safe spot. Picks (Pickard) bailed us out and gave us an opportunity to stay in the game, but it was just too much.”

In a town that blames every loss on the goaltending, surely nobody was crooning that tired old song after this loss.

Pickard stopped Josh Anderson on a breakaway. Then Nick Suzuki had a pair of breakaways and came up empty. For good measure, Alexandre Texier was given the opportunity to bear down on Pickard from the centre line and came away with nothing.

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Pickard has likely played in shootouts and seen fewer breakaways than the Oilers skaters coughed up Sunday, on a night where they had jump, but their execution was tragic.

It started with a full, two-minute five-on-three power play just 6:04 into the game, when two Canadiens went to the box at the same time.

With Leon Draisaitl in search of point No. 1,000, that power play could have been the springboard to a fun night at the Bell Centre for the Oilers. Score one or two early, and this one might have been a whole lot different.

“There were a lot of things on that power play,” Knoblauch said. “I thought we had some good chances, their goalie made some unbelievable saves. They made some nice defensive plays, and we even had an empty net that one of our players blocked.

“But, yeah, that definitely would have made a difference.”

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Montreal’s power play scored twice — the difference in the game — and from there, “We got behind in the second (period), and then there was too much run-and-gun for me,” Mattias Ekholm said. “Without Picks tonight, it could have been a lot worse.”

File this one under “You can’t win ‘em all.”

Far more importantly, will be how the Oilers bounce back after their first regulation loss in six games.

“Credit to Montreal, they played well,” Knoblauch said. “But we are feeling confident. We’ve scored a lot of goals (lately), we’re starting to win, and now some bad habits are creeping into our game — when things are going well.

“We gave up four breakaways, two-on-ones… It’s just not sustainable.”