Edmonton Oilers start slow, finish strong, find new way to lose against Rangers

A defensive zone meltdown leads to an early first goal.

The worst home-ice penalty kill in league history surrenders the second goal.

A nothing shot from the high slot eludes the goalie, and suddenly the game looks out of reach.

If this all sounds familiar, that's because storylines like these have played out too many times at Rogers Place this season.

It's not that the Edmonton Oilers keep finding new ways to lose.

It's that, for the most part, they keep losing in the same ways, time after time.

'We didn't engage at all'

On Saturday, for the reasons listed above, and despite the typical offensive heroics from captain Connor McDavid, the Oilers came out on the losing end of a 3-2 score against the New York Rangers.

Suffice to say that coach Todd McLellan wasn't happy to see his team start slowly yet again.

"We didn't engage at all in the first period," he said. "We weren't interested in physically being involved in the game."

The first Rangers goal came in the first minute, the result of a four-alarm meltdown in the defensive zone. It looked like a nothing play. But when defenceman Kris Russell wandered too far out toward the boards up by the blue line, he left his partner, Darnell Nurse, alone in front of the net.

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That gave Rangers centre Mika Zibanejad plenty of space to skate the puck off the corner. He passed across the slot to an open Chris Kreider, who slammed it home. Oilers goalie Cam Talbot had no chance.

The home team was flat for the whole period. They only attempted 11 shots. Three went wide, two were blocked and just six got through to the goaltender Alexandar Georgiev, who prior to Saturday night had a grand total of two NHL games under his belt. Both of them losses.

Conventional wisdom says you should try to test the rookie as often as possible.

Rangers 1, Conventional Wisdom 1

Less than six minutes into the second, McDavid proved why that wisdom has become conventional. He came hustling down boards with the puck but had no angle to cut toward the net. Past the left-hand face-off dot, he really had no play but to take a no-chance shot from a terrible angle. Sure enough, the puck squeezed between Georgiev's arm and the near goal post. Rangers 1, conventional wisdom 1.

Any momentum the Oilers gained was lost 17 seconds later, when Talbot got fingered for delay of game after shooting the puck over the boards.

Zibanejad scored on the power play to put the Rangers back in the lead. They went up by two not long after, when Talbot let in an easy one from the high slot.

His team down 3-2, McLellan loaded up his top line, shifting Ryan Nugent-Hopkins up to play on McDavid's wing. The move paid off when McDavid took a perfect head-man pass as he crossed the Rangers blue line and sped for the net. He slipped a pass across to Nugent-Hopkins, who scored his 17th of the season in his first game since mid-January.

That made it 3-2.

The Oilers played like a different team in the third period. They outshot the Rangers 15-4. McDavid drew two penalties. But the Oilers' power play, the worst in the league, couldn't score.

A new way to lose

Finally, just to keep things interesting, the home team found a new way to lose.

With the man advantage and a minute and change left in the game, the Oilers switched their power play unit. Three guys to the bench, three guys over the boards. Actually, make that four guys over the boards. Veteran Michael Cammalleri had been assigned to replace Talbot once the goalie was pulled for the extra attacker. Problem was, Talbot was still in the net.

The too-many-men penalty killed whatever chance the Oilers had left.

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"The semantics really don't matter," Cammalleri said. "It was my fault, not the coach's. He was clear. I made an error in my read. It was my fault."

His coach agreed with that assessment.

"There's a line assigned [to change] and there's one individual player that gets assigned  the position for the goaltender," McLellan said. "And that individual left light years before he should have."

With the loss, the 27-34-4 Oilers remain light years out of the playoffs.

They haven't been mathematically eliminated, but that, too, is really just semantics.