EDMONTON — The Edmonton Oilers’ second season as a recovering Stanley Cup finalist has been… well, let’s just say they’ve taken it one day at a time.
They’ve learned how to get to April 15 in a comfortable playoff position, without expending too much energy along the way. How to maintain the level in everyone’s personal game to stay at or near the top of the Pacific, then find a team game when needed after the Olympic break — but not necessarily before.
How to be good enough, while saving your best for last.
Because if there’s one thing they know, it’s that you can’t play playoff hockey in December. Not if you plan on playing it in June.
“The expectations are to win the Stanley Cup,” Zach Hyman said Wednesday. “We lose in the final, we lose in the first round — we’re going to be pissed.”
When you’re in the middle of a Stanley Cup window, it’s all about the 16 wins from April to June. The 82 games before that, they’re crab cakes: the appetizer before the main course.
And the more playoff hockey you’ve played, the more that becomes ingrained in the DNA of an NHL team.
“Playoff experience,” began Hyman. “When you don’t have it, you don’t really think it’s that important. And when you do, you realize it is important.”
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Expound on that, could you?
“When you’re a young kid and it’s your first playoff game, you’re taken aback. Everything’s different,” Hyman, who will be in the lineup Thursday against the Canucks, explained. “Players play differently. Everything’s faster. Every play matters. It’s just a different, different game.
“That’s why you see teams like Florida, who had 98 points last year, and then they turned it on. They were the best team by quite a (distance) in the East.”
And, in the end, two games better than these Oilers.
Edmonton has been a 100-plus point team for four straight seasons. As we arrive at Game 82 Thursday in Edmonton, a point earned against the hapless Vancouver Canucks — and with playoff seeding at stake, can you envisage a world in which Edmonton doesn’t win by two or three? — the Oilers will close out the 2025-26 season with 92 or 93 points, good for (at least) second place in the pillow-fight Pacific.
Frankly, had Leon Draisaitl and then Hyman not been injured late in the season, the Oilers would likely have two or three more points and be home and cooled atop the division. But really, who cares?
“You want to put yourself in a position that you can be comfortable going into the playoffs, and obviously we’re not,” Hyman said. “We’ve got to win a game here. But at the same time, you still have the confidence that when you get in you can beat anybody.”
I know this: from about 2008 to 2011, if those Canucks teams needed a late season victory over Edmonton to feather their playoff nest, we all would have bet the house that the Sedins et al would take both points from those inferior Oilers teams.
Today, the skate is on the other foot.
“We’re pretty confident,” Hyman said. “I mean, it’s kind of how we’ve been the whole time. It’s a big game for us. Every game we go into we’re confident that we can win.”
Thursday’s game is, in fact, a chance to kick in a little muscle memory before the games start for real.
There is a chance, should Vegas somehow lose in regulation Wednesday, that a win could give Edmonton first place. More importantly, if the tumblers fall the right way, there’s a chance a regulation loss could send Edmonton down to Colorado for Game 1, with a slog through the Central ahead even if they pull off an improbable upset over the Avalanche.
Simply winning and playing either Anaheim or Los Angeles makes the stakes high in Game 82, a nice rehearsal for the gut-wrenching games that lie ahead.
“For a lot of us, these last few years, we’ve played a lot of hockey,” said veteran Darnell Nurse. “I wouldn’t say (playoff hockey) is the same feeling as a regular-season game — it’s more amplified, the context of the game. But there’s a familiarity and comfort to it.”
And they’re closing in on that game, just in time for the games they’ve been waiting for all season.
“This last week, we haven’t gotten all the results we wanted. But we played really well,” assessed Nurse. “It’s on us to bring that again against Vancouver — the full package. Be able to create some more offence for our team, but not at the expense of our defence.”
If your game isn’t at a point that makes a speed bump out of Vancouver — with this much on the line — then what’s next doesn’t really matter, does it?