“I think this team just loves the big stage. They love big moments and they’ve gone for it. I think it’s because they saw the other side of it a long time ago when things were rock bottom.”
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If the Edmonton Oilers had been told in mid-November that their final home game of the season would be Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final with no further guarantees, they would have jumped at the chance.
The team’s head coach had just been fired after an inexplicable start to the season with three wins, nine losses and one draw that left them in 31st place out of 32 teams, a far cry from the expectations placed on Connor McDavid and his team.
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The goaltender who was named in the starting lineup when the regular season began has already been sent back to farm, never to be seen again.
Their captain was playing through an injury and instead of being his usual McNificent self, he actually looked like he was near death.
And then a guy named Chris Knoblauch was recruited from the American Hockey League to its first head coaching job, apparently solely because he’d coached McDavid in junior high, as if that was enough of a connection to take on what could be the biggest single-season upset in NHL history.
“This year has obviously been up and down, but for the most part we’ve been good after a tough start, of course,” said Oilers forward Leon Draisaitl, who is third on the NHL playoff scoring list with 10 goals and 20 assists in 23 games. “I think we’ve proven that we’re a very tenacious team and that we’re strong when the going gets tough.”
“Obviously, we like being in these situations. We’ve been there a lot this year and feel very comfortable.”
The same goes for the finals, where they went from being down 3-0 to being one win away from heading into Game 7 of the Stanley Cup.
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And then we play our final (if you like the phrase) night of hockey in Canada.
“I think the team is just enjoying the process,” Knobloch said ahead of Game 6 at Rogers Place (6 p.m., CBC, Sportsnet). “We’ve talked about being down and I think we’re just enjoying the game.”
Of course, their playoff journey hasn’t been the most pleasant, with them losing twice to the Vancouver Canucks in the second round and in the finals twice already.
Additionally, after beating the Los Angeles Kings in Game 5 of the first round and the Dallas Stars in Game 6 of the third round, the Oilers are a perfect 6-0 in elimination games this playoff series, both for themselves and their opponents, and will record their seventh win tonight.
“Whether we’re facing elimination or in a position to beat an eliminated team, we’re 6-0. We’re averaging 4.5 goals per game and 1.8 goals allowed,” Knoblauch said. “I think this team just loves the big stage. They love big moments and they go with it. And I think that’s because they saw the other side of it a long time ago when things were rock bottom.”
“For now, they can just play hockey and have fun.”
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At the very least, it’s a lot better than when they were down 3-0 to the Florida Panthers, or when they were sleeping at the bottom of the NHL standings a little over seven months ago.
“It’s been so hard this whole year, so I think the message was that we deserved to be in this situation and we don’t need to get down,” said Oilers forward Zach Hyman, who leads the NHL playoffs with 15 goals in 23 games. “Looking back on the series, I think after those three games it was better than losing 3-0, but there are no morale-boosting wins in hockey. We deserved to be in that situation.”
“But we believed that if any team could come out of that, it was us. The way this season has gone, the way we’ve played in the face of adversity, the way we’ve played in the face of defeat, we feel we can do it. We believed that when we were down 3-0, we believe that when we’re down 3-2. So if any team can do it, it’s this team.”
Email: gmoddejonge@postmedia.com
Twitter: @GerryModdejonge
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