Canucks can fully unravel Oilers’ season, start to finish, with a Game 7 win

VANCOUVER — The baggage shouldn’t be a burden. When the Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks stride into Rogers Arena on Monday night for Game 7, neither team should be wearing the ghosts of playoffs’ past, the fact that one franchise has never won, and especially not Canada’s 30-year Stanley Cup drought.

No, the recent history – from just this season, between these two teams – is so much juicier than that.

Rewind back to Nov. 6, 2023, just 196 days ago. It was a Monday in the Lower Mainland, a sleepy night on the NHL calendar everywhere except for Oil Country.

The Oilers were reeling. Connor McDavid called their start to the season “death by a thousand cuts,” that weekend as he and Leon Draisaitl slumped out of the gate. Their coach was on life support. Stuart Skinner couldn’t buy a save. Their playoff odds were dwindling.

And the Canucks thrashed the Oilers that night, rolling to a 6-2 victory. It marked the third time in the first 27 days of the season that Vancouver rinsed Edmonton, outscoring them 18-6 in the process.

Coach Jay Woodcroft was ejected that night, tossed from the bench with six minutes to play on a rare stoppage that occurred because of something he said in the middle of an Oilers power play. Woodcroft didn’t survive the week. He’ll likely be keeping tabs on Game 7 from Czechia, where he is helping coach Team Canada at the World Championship, still on Edmonton’s payroll.

The Canucks dropped the Oilers to 2-8-1. The next day, Nov. 7, Jack Campbell was placed on waivers for purposes of assignment to AHL Bakersfield – never to be seen again in an Oilers uniform this season. So much has changed in the six months since. Eight of the 40 players in the lineup that Nov. 6 night will not play in Game 7, including Andrei Kuzmenko, Anthony Beauvillier and injured Vezina Trophy finalist Thatcher Demko. There was no Elias Lindholm or Nikita Zadorov yet for the ultra-aggressive Canucks. The Oilers were the best team in hockey, by a wide margin, from that following week until the end of the regular season.

But one thing has not changed. No team, not in November and certainly not now in the hours ahead of this winner-take-all elimination game, has done more than the Canucks to unravel the Oilers’ “Cup or Bust” season – as Draisaitl called it in September. The Canucks can put the nail in the coffin on Monday night and advance to their first Western Conference Final since 2011 with an unquestionable 8-3 record against the Oilers.

Or, Edmonton can vanquish this season’s Vancouver demons once and for all, and emerge as Canada’s last team standing. What’s it gonna be?

“I would expect it to be a highly competitive, great Game 7,” McDavid said Saturday night. “The series has been so tight, so hotly contested … I would expect both teams to elevate heading into a big Game 7.”

It’s a Game 7 where it’s almost impossible to pinpoint which team is facing more pressure.  The Oilers are in Year 9 of the Connor McDavid Experience, their sixth playoff run with the best player on Planet Earth and maybe the best playoff performer of his generation in Draisaitl, and anything less than another Conference Final appearance – with this comparatively breezy path to the Final Four – would be considered an absolute failure. When you’re facing a team’s third goaltender for seven games, you have to find a way to win. Period.

So, that means the Canucks are playing with house money then, right? If you told the Canucks in September, after president Jim Rutherford said they could be a playoff team “if everything goes right,” that they’d have a chance to be in the Final Four, they’d have jumped.

“I think everyone’s aware of the opportunity that we have,” Canucks defenseman Ian Cole told reporters Sunday. “I mean, we’re in a Game 7 against, you know, an extremely good hockey team that no one gave us a chance to really be in the series with, so we’re in a good spot. We got one game at home to win the series. Taking a step back, putting it into some perspective, I think we should be very excited at the opportunity that we have, and we should be very energized by that.”

All of those things would be true except for, well, how we arrived at this point in this gloriously entertaining, all-Canadian best-of-seven. The Canucks have held leads of 1-0, 2-1, 3-2 and yet every time, the Oilers have had an answer in this chess match. They had their kill shot in Game 6 and missed an opportunity to make life difficult for Stuart Skinner, who returned to the net after starting the series with a .793 save percentage. Now, Vancouver will be without its leading goal scorer in the playoffs, Brock Boeser, after team medical staff discovered a blood clot in his leg following Game 6. 

Boeser has since been placed on blood thinning medication, effectively ending his season no matter how how deep Vancouver plays. It’s a brutal break for Boeser and for the Canucks, as he’s been a certified Oiler killer with nine goals against Edmonton this season.

On top of that crushing blow, there is also the not-so-small matter of the Canucks’ disappointing effort in Game 6. After five one-goal games to open the series, the Oilers broke through in their 10th game of the season-long battle to finally earn their first true start-to-finish victory on Saturday. It might be a recipe. It might be nothing, as the Oilers haven’t been able to convert one convincing period to the next, like dominating the third period of Game 2 only to get punched in the face to open Game 3.

“Every game is its own,” Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said. “The only momentum that ever happens is maybe shift to shift. Other than that, there’s no momentum. For us, having an opportunity to win Game 7 in Vancouver, we’re going to have to play well. They’re going to be much, much better than they [were Saturday]. We can feel good about it, but they’re going to be a much different team in Game 7 than they were in Game 6.”

It will come down to compete, said Canucks coach Rick Tocchet, who as a player lost to Wayne Gretzky and the high-flying Oilers in Game 7 of the 1987 Stanley Cup Final. Tocchet has turned in a Jack Adams-worthy job in both the regular season and this series with his game-to-game adjustments. What does he have up his sleeve now?

“It’s got nothing to do with Xs and Os last game and they know it,” Tocchet told reporters Sunday. “It’s Game 7. We’ve seen enough video, we’ve seen this team, it’s going to be seven straight games. It’s not Xs and Os. We know how they want to play. They know how we want to play, and it really comes down to execution.”

Yes, quite literally, that is what Game 7 really comes down to: the execution of one team’s season. Buckle up. With one foot in a frying pan and the other one in a pressure cooker, two proud Canadian franchises are about to put it all on the line – for bragging rights, for posterity, and for a shot at Stanley glory.