Uncharted: Resilient Oilers win third in a row on Drake Caggiula's late goal

Last night's game at Rogers Place could be called Uncharted 3: Drake's Revenge.

For the first time all season, the Edmonton Oilers have strung together three straight wins, which puts them in uncharted waters.

Drake Caggiula is the guy who put them there.

His goal with 49 seconds left gave the Oilers a 3-2 victory Thursday over the St. Louis Blues, a team that went into the night tied for the lead in the Western Conference.

After a scoreless first 40 minutes, the Oilers got behind twice in the third period and came roaring back both times to knot the score.

The play that won the game was started on the back check by Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who stole the puck and head-manned it to winger Patrick Maroon.

In the Blues zone, Maroon protected the puck against the boards, waiting for his line mates to catch up. He then passed it behind the net, where Nugent-Hopkins took control. He held off defenders until Caggiula came open in front before slipping him a perfect pass in the slot. Caggiula didn't get all of it, but he got enough.

Dreaming of a .500 Christmas

The win gives the 16-17-2 Oilers a chance to reach .500 for the season going into the Christmas break. They haven't had a .500 record since the second game of the season. Uncharted indeed.

The Oilers look nothing like the team that lost twice to the Blues in November, by lopsided scores of 4-1 and 8-3.

With a record of 6-3 in December, they now look a lot like the team that won a playoff series last spring and almost won another.

For now, at least, there will be no more talk about how slow they look. No more talk about shaky defence. No more questions about the play of goaltender Cam Talbot.

For the moment, fans are likely starting to think: They're back, baby!   

What a difference three weeks has made.

The game saw the return of injured defenceman Andrej Sekera, who tore his ACL in Game 5 of the second-round playoff series against Anaheim last May. In his first game in more than seven months, Sekera played more than 16 minutes and showed why he's a leader on the blue line.

Asked later to rate the importance of the win on a scale of one to 10, Sekera smiled and said, "Eleven."

"For us, every point is important," he said. "Especially against a good team like this, it's a good confidence boost for the group."

The game started as a snoozer. In the first period, the Oilers looked sluggish, like a middle-aged uncle after Christmas dinner wandering toward the couch for a nap.

They got a four-minute power play and managed only a single shot on goal, though Nugent-Hopkins did ring one off the post, the first of four iron-clangers they had on the night.

The Blues carried the play and outshot the Oilers 10-5 in the period. Talbot made key saves to keep the game scoreless.

It stayed that way until 9:30 in the third period, when Tage Thompson scored to put the Blues up 1-0.

The November Oilers might have been done at that point.

The December Oilers answered less than 40 seconds later, when Mike Cammalleri tied the score with a bad-angle shot that beat Blues goalie Jake Allen.

Three minutes later, Patrik Berglund put the Blues ahead.

November, December: compare and contrast

Again the Oilers responded. With less than four minutes left, Milan Lucic fed a pass to Leon Draisaitl, who rushing in on a two-on-one, slipped the puck to Connor McDavid for the tying goal. That set the stage for Caggiula's winner.

On Nov. 21, the Oilers got mauled by the Blues 8-3, perhaps the low point of the season. Afterward, coach Todd McLellan called his team's performance "indefensible" and said he was "very, very concerned."

Exactly a month later, a much different outcome, a much happier coach

"We've been resilient in the past three weeks as a team," McLellan said after Thursday's game. "I haven't heard anybody talk about our team lately being slow. We didn't go out and make 15 trades. We just play the game right, now."

They have a chance to play it right again on Saturday, when the Montreal Canadiens come to town. A fourth straight win would go a long way to making Christmas a little merrier for the Oilers and their fans.