Edmonton Oilers eager to clean up ‘big mistakes’ before Blackhawks

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The Edmonton Oilers might still be months away from hearing another “dig in, right now,” playoff speech from Connor McDavid, as made famous on Amazon Prime’s ‘Faceoff: Inside the NHL‘.

But it’s the now part that the team looking to rebound after losing Game 7 of last year’s Stanley Cup Final by one goal didn’t really seem to carry over with them into the regular season.

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Opening day ended in a fizzle of a 6-0 loss to the Winnipeg Jets at home on Wednesday, leaving more questions than answers surrounding an Oilers squad that was supposed to come into this year hellbent on unfinished business.

Instead, they looked done almost as soon as it began, with the Jets piling up goal upon goal against an Oilers circus that was already folding up the tent to head out of town.

An offence that had improved on paper, at least, couldn’t get anything going, while a defence that likely took a couple steps back in free agency, appeared to be facing the wrong way entirely from the drop of the puck. They hung their goaltender out to dry, and then didn’t fair much better once his replacement was brought in after allowing five goals on 18 shots.

“You can look at Game 1 and say the world’s over. I think there is just so much hockey to be played for our group,” said veteran defenceman Darnell Nurse. “There is the new bodies, the new essence of learning the system and whatnot, but we’ve had a whole camp.

“For us, it’s just cleaning up the details of the game, maybe executing at a higher level. Whether it’s tape-to-tape passes, reads, communication in the D-zone, that’s the big thing for us. If we can communicate a little bit more, talk our way through the defensive zone and close things off a little bit quicker, it will make our life a lot easier.”

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The only ‘D’ on display in the Oilers end Wednesday was discombobulation, as it became obvious replacing the likes of Cody Ceci, Vincent Desharnais and Philip Broberg was going to take longer than a summer.

“I think there were just big mistakes,” McDavid said. “The mistakes that we made were big mistakes and they led to Grade-A chances, not to say there was an insane amount of them. Just the ones there were, were the big ones.”

While it’s a far cry from falling behind 3-0 in the Stanley Cup Final, there is still a feeling of urgency for this team to start the season off on the right foot, especially considering what happened out of the gates a year ago, when a 2-9-1 start led to the unenviable scenario of undergoing a mid-season coaching change.

“It starts with how you show up tomorrow,” said McDavid, whose team will take on the Chicago Blackhawks at Rogers Place on Saturday (8 p.m., CBC, Sportsnet). “For the leaders of the group, tomorrow’s a good day to show up and be ready to roll.

“You want to see the game start to come together. It’s been a couple weeks of camp, not a very good pre-season and obviously not a very good start the other day. So, you want to see the game start to come together at some point.”

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Offensively, it is only a matter of time.

McDavid looked anything but himself to start last season before charging all the way into the top three in NHL points by the end, and leading the way throughout the playoffs.

Leon Draisaitl was right behind him in playoff points, while Zach Hyman is coming off his first 50-goal season.

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Defensively, the Oilers don’t quite seem to know all the pieces they have just yet, let alone how they will all fit together, as newcomers Ty Emberson and Travis Dermott are likely to swap spots Saturday as the Oilers test out different defensive pairings for Nurse and Brett Kulak.

The Oilers just need to ensure the time it takes to find the necessary familiarity doesn’t come at the expense of falling behind in the standings early on.

“Urgency’s probably a good word for it because as a group, we saw last year the hole that we had to dig ourselves out of when we weren’t dialed in for the first month,” Nurse said. “And for us, we had to put together an eight-game win streak and then a 16-game win streak to put ourselves in the driver’s seat. And that was a lot of work.

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“And the position we’re in right now after the season that we just had, to get to the playoffs is going to be just as hard no matter how you start the season. So, there is an urgency in this group, I think. Obviously, we have patience, we believe in each other. I think our character in this room and how we are able to battle through things can’t really be questioned after what we’ve done over the last few years, but with all that said, I think for us, we know we need to play at a higher level and there’s a higher standard that we’ve got to get to.”

E-mail: [email protected]

On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge

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