EDMONTON — Here’s the difference between you and I, and an actual National Hockey League hockey player.
The Oilers fan woke up sour Friday morning, not 12 hours after their team had been manhandled — as usual — by those damned Florida Panthers.
They went to work, groused about the game with their co-worker — who watched the game as well, of course — fired the coach a couple of times, cursed out Matthew Tkachuk and questioned the Oilers’ collective manhood. By lunch, they felt a bit better.
The media guy jumped on the radio at 8 a.m., where all the talk was about how the coach should have demanded more — what was he talking about in that post-game presser? — and how the Oilers didn’t come close to responding to Florida’s physical play.
“Why didn’t the fourth line start the game?”
“Why didn’t anyone respond to those first two massive bodychecks that Florida threw in the opening few minutes?”
“Man, the Oilers need to take a long look in the mirror when it comes to emotion, heart, guts and compete.”
And then you have the Oilers player.
He had breakfast with the kids, came to the rink, strapped on the gear for about the 150th time this season, and sweated out a practice.
“We go over it, we go through it, and (then) it’s yesterday’s news,” began Mattias Ekholm, as accountable a player as exists inside the Oilers’ dressing room. “We’ve got a big game coming up tomorrow (against Tampa), and next week we’ve got a really big week with a lot of divisional opponents.
“So yeah, we’ve got a lot of hockey ahead of us, and we can’t dwell on it too much or learn from it. Move on.”
There’s an unrelenting truth in the sports radio business that dictates the phone and text lines are always way busier after a team loses, compared to after a win.
People want to vent. Or they want to tell someone exactly what’s wrong with the team’s approach.
They want to fire a coach. They want to remind someone what Darnell Nurse makes per season, or how sub-optimum the Tristan Jarry trade was.
But an NHL player?
“You’ve just got to move on. Understand what we did wrong, and how to fix it,” said winger Max Jones. “We understand it. We know we’ve got better in here — everyone knows that. So you have a good day on the ice, and then you look forward to the next game.”
Boring eh? That’s the plan, we suspect.
It’s the media person’s job not to move on quite so quickly, however. You can’t let the news cycle die on such a shallow performance; such an unemotional game against a team that beat you in consecutive Stanley Cup Finals.
And so Ekholm did his level best to field those questions, with his gaze firmly set on tomorrow, not yesterday.
“The emotion of the game may be the biggest thing. We could have been a little bit more engaged early on,” he said. “We could have played better — that’s the bottom line.”
If you want to live in the past, well, Ekholm can play that game too.
“There was a game against Dallas last week that we didn’t like either. But we moved on, and we got two wins and an OT loss in the next three games,” he reminded. “You can sit on (that 4-0 loss to Florida) as much as you want. I’m sure everybody in here does it differently. But if you ask me, we have 82 games. If I’m sitting too long on every game, it’s not going to help me anyway. So I try to move on as fast as I can.
“Yeah. Tomorrow.”
So, what did we learn about the Oilers, as they laid an egg on home ice on a night where five Pacific Division teams combined to earn just a single loser among them?
For one, the defence is one pair deep these days.
At five-on-five against Florida, the Ekholm-Evan Bouchard pair had a 76 per cent shot share. They are a true first pairing, able to provide offence and defend against the opponent’s top line.
Beyond that, the Nurse-Connor Murphy (25 per cent) and Jake Walman-Spencer Stastney (14 per cent) pairs got caved in by Florida.
Walman has struggled for a long time. Nurse’s game is too much of a roller coaster for an 800-game defenceman. Stastney is a No. 7 on a good team, sorry.
And as far as emotion, if the sight of that Panthers logo can’t get it out of you, we’re a little concerned. Head coach Kris Knoblauch likely should have utilized his fourth line more, maybe off the opening draw, had he known how flat his club would be.
“The first period, it seemed like it was a little bit sleepy out there,” admitted Jones, who as a fourth liner who doesn’t kill penalties, gets about eight minutes of ice time a night. “(The solution) could just come from a couple shifts from us on the fourth line. Get out there, hammer some guys and then try to wake it up that way.”
You can deploy whomever you want however you want. If a team doesn’t play with more jump and juice than Edmonton brought to the table Thursday, it won’t matter.
Now they get the Tampa Bay Lightning, as good a team as exists in the NHL today.
The Oilers are supposed to be good too.
Guess we’ll see what tomorrow brings.
