The Edmonton Oilers defeated the New York Rangers 2–0 Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. Trent Frederic scored his first regular season goal as an Oiler, then Henrique plotted his first of the season on an empty cage. Stuart Skinner also battled his way to his first shutout of the season, a 30-save triumph!
This was both a slow and a fast game: slow due to a lazy pace from both teams—only 28 total shots in the first two periods—but fast because there were few stoppages, only three power plays, and two goals. This was a far less complete game than the Vancouver game last week, with a faltering offence and an error-prone defence.
Despite their slow play, the Oilers still felt like they controlled more of the game than not, and have the Rangers even slower play to thank for their two points.
Here are the stories of the game.
Stuart Skinner takes his redemption
The doubt in Stuart Skinner started early this year with the first game of the season, at home, against Calgary. After the Oilers jumped out to an early 3–0 lead, Calgary came right back and won the game in a shootout. While three goals against in the first game is by no means grounds to give up on Skinner, it was the type of goals he let in, especially the tying goal, a horrendous miscommunication with Evan Bouchard that led to Blake Coleman tapping the puck between Skinner’s legs with one hand on his stick. Skinner is sometimes prone to these types of goals against, and they don’t inspire much confidence in a goalie.
If you’re going to fault a person when they make a mistake though, you need to congratulate them on their victories, and that’s what today was. Skinner basically stole this game frankly, as the Oilers offence only put up 22 shots all game and didn’t score the second goal until Igor Shesterkin was pulled in favour of a sixth skater. Skinner could have let in two goals, still posting a .933 Sv% and the Oilers would likely have lost this game.
While he certainly didn’t play perfect yesterday, he made a number of quality saves, especially while the Oilers were on the penalty kill. Credit where it’s due, this win belongs to Stuart Skinner.
Slow offence, shaky defence
Come the third period it seemed like we were seeing a different line every 45 seconds. Kris Knoblauch was likely attempting to jumpstart the offence because, at the end of the second, the Oilers only had 11 shots. He also split up Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl for much of the third frame.
After seeing the Oilers excel against Vancouver with consistent lines and McDavid and Draisaitl together, I can’t agree with the decision to shake things up so continuously. If you want to jump start your offence, it’s never a bad idea to put two of the best players of all time on the same line.
Unfortunately, the defence followed the forward’s lead in this game. In the first period especially, there were more turnovers than Sunday morning at a bakery. Only through Stu Skinner and some luck were the Oilers able to win this game.
Let’s hope that the Vancouver game was a better showing of what the Oilers will be this year because they won’t win many games being that generous with the puck.
Rangers hate scoring
On the other side of the ice, the Rangers have now been shutout for three straight home games, a (modern) NHL record for longest home goal drought to start the season. As they say, sucks to suck.
The Pittsburgh Pirates, yes, they were an NHL team from 1925–1930, named after the MLB franchise that already existed, have the record at 187 minutes and 19 seconds. The Rangers need to score in the first seven minutes 19 seconds of their next home game against Minnesota to avoid that embarrassing record.
Photo by Derek Cain/Icon Sportswire
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