Takeaways from the Edmonton Oilers 6–3 victory over the Utah Mammoth

The Edmonton Oilers defeated the Utah Mammoth 6–3 in their first visit to Rogers Place. What was a glacial start turned into an impressive character win for the Oilers. The second period saw goals from five unique players before McDavid put the nail in the coffin with an empty net goal.

While Stuart Skinner will at least be happy the Oilers secured the win, it was a terrible night to be a goalie. Nine goals were scored on only 49 shots, a collective Sv% of .816, (though technically the last goal was an empty-netter so it’s a little better than that). Goalie woes aside, the Oilers were able to end Utah’s win streak at seven in tonight’s high scoring affair.

Here are the stories of the game:

Early defensive lapses

Right out of the gate this game looked like so many before it this season. Edmonton was slow and lazy while Utah was floating around like a herd of wild hummingbirds, if someone replaced their sugar water with Red Bull. It’s easy to see how this Utah team has started so well considering how creative, skilled, and fast they are. A poor backchecking team would be quickly exposed in the face of Utah’s blazing fast rushes and excellent vision on the ice.

That is exactly what happened to Edmonton in the first period. Too many times Utah was on the odd man rush and the next person to come into frame was wearing a Mammoth jersey. Too many times were these rushes gifted to the Mammoth via a careless play from one of the Oilers. While the turnovers were less egregious in this game than in past games, Evan Bouchard and Darnell Nurse simply need to act with a little more urgency in their own end.

While the Oilers defence does need to be better, backchecking generally falls to the forwards, and this is another area that the Oilers could use some work.

I don’t know one single skater who prefers stopping goals to scoring them; I don’t know one single great defensive defenceman who gets more attention than a great offensive defenceman. My point is that it’s human nature for players to want to score goals. The team on the rush is more likely have the numbers on their side, as everyone joins the rush in hopes of scoring. Despite that, the forwards need to rush back and pretend like TSN just created a new “top 50 backchecks” to play on repeat from 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.

Return to form for the offence

After the dismal first period, it looked like Utah was going to push their win streak to eight, but the offence suddenly agreed on which side of the ice they were supposed to score on. Goals from Mattias Ekholm, Isaac Howard, Leon Draisaitl, Ty Emberson, and McDavid in the second period quickly brought the score to 5–3.

This was a welcomed sight as the Oilers just haven’t been scoring like we have come to expect in recent years. Coming into this game, Edmonton had the 21st highest GF/GP in the league at 2.9 whereas they have typically been in the top ten, well above 3.0 GF/GP. It would be great to see them get back to their 2022–23 rate of 3.96 GF/GP.

I won’t lie, despite still having a solid point total of 14 points in 11 games, to me, McDavid hasn’t looked quite like himself yet. This early in the season I’m not even remotely worried about it though; if humans had to choose one single human to be the first person to meet an alien civilization and speak for humanity, I would vote for McDavid.

One very encouraging aspect of last night’s scoresheet was that the Oiler’s goals came from unexpected places. Two goals from two of the lower scoring defencemen and one from a rookie, and yet they were supported by the all-stars in McDavid and Draisaitl. Two goals every night from the bottom-six forwards and/or bottom-three defenceman would bring this team straight back to the Stanley Cup Final.

No time to panic

While this hasn’t quite been the start Oilers fans hoped for, this is the best start the Oilers have had in two years and those two years were, relatively speaking, pretty successful. In 2023 they started 2–8–1 and last year they were 5–5–1 through their first 11 games.

The season is extremely long—84 games kinda long now. Already the Oilers are showing signs of turning things around. We will see if they can keep up the offence Thursday night against the New York Rangers.