Draisaitl breaks unwritten rule, calling out Oilers struggling penalty kill
Leon Draisaitl knew that he had trod on to murky ground and was, to some degree, speaking out of turn after a discouraging loss to open the Western Conference Final. The Oilers centre, however, is not a tap dancer. Either he says nothing, or he speaks the truth.
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DALLAS — Among the many unwritten rules that govern a hockey dressing room, one of the most sacred is the one that Leon Draisaitl contravened in the discouraging moments after Game 1 of the Western Conference Final.
Let’s call it “The Code”, and subsection XXVI, article 62.2 reads as such: No player shall critique a part of the team that he is not party to or a participant therein.
What it means is, a goalie never criticizes the skaters (or vice versa), a forward never tells a defenceman how to handle his gaps or block a shot, and a guy who isn’t a regular on a stinky Oilers penalty killing unit is expected to hold his comments on how that fermenting PK has crippled the team during parts of this post-season.
“We’ve got to stay out of the box,” began Draisaitl, standing in the Oilers’ room after a 6-3 loss that fell directly at the feet of the penalty killing units. “There are going to be penalties. You’ve got to come up with a kill.”
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At that moment, Draisaitl knew that he had trod on to murky ground, and was to some degree speaking out of turn — despite his stature in the room and the fact he had just produced a game for the ages, all wasted by a penalty kill that surrendered three goals in six minutes early in Period 3.
Draisaitl, however, is not a tap dancer. Either he says nothing, or he speaks the truth, and this elite piece of German engineering doesn’t really have a third gear.
“I’m not on it, so who am I to say anything?” he said. “But that’s just common sense. That’s a fact.
“Then, once you have a chance to tie the game up on the power play, it’s our turn to be much better than that.”
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For what it’s worth, Connor McDavid, who only recently began killing penalties semi-regularly, stepped outside those same accepted norms of team etiquette the very next day. Again, in the spirit of stating the obvious.
What was McDavid’s takeaway from Game 1?
“Really good for 40 (minutes), and really bad for 20,” he deadpanned. “Where it got away from us, obviously, (was) the kill. A two-goal lead in the third, we take a couple penalties, and we’ve got to find a way to get a kill. Giving up three is obviously not good enough.”
Later, he doubled down: “Ultimately, we’ve got to find a way to get a kill on one of those, two of those, whatever. Just to give ourselves a chance.”
The visual of McDavid sitting on the bench next to Draisaitl, as the Stars’ powerplay poured pucks past goaltender Stuart Skinner, who definitely needs to be better, while a crucial playoff lead transformed into a deficit before their very eyes, was stark.
A McDavid glance to Draisaitl. A wordless acknowledgement back to the captain that, yes, this is becoming an issue again.
The internet eats that stuff up, that McDrai look that reminds us all that no matter how super the superstars might be, this isn’t the NBA. It takes a team to win a Stanley Cup.
“Of course it needs to get figured out,” said Connor Brown, a charter member of a penalty kill that surrendered just four goals in 25 games last spring, but has leaked away 14 already in these playoffs. “Anytime you have a you have a hole in your game, you’re looking at it.
“We’re not shying away from it. We’re not just pretending it’s going to get fixed without attention to detail and accountability.”
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A unit that functioned at 94.3 percent a year ago has spiralled to 62.2 percent this spring.
The Oilers have, as we said, allowed 14 goals in 12 games. Meanwhile, the three other remaining teams — Carolina, Florida, Dallas — have combined to allow 16 power-play goals against this spring.
That’s not just a malady or a touch of the hockey flu. It could be fatal to the Oilers’ Stanley Cup chances.
Head coach Kris Knoblauch and assistant coach Mark Stuart have been under the hood of this unit all season long. It was a middle-of-the-pack unit rife with wild inconsistency all season long, and it hasn’t been any better in the playoffs.
The question is, will it become an Achilles heel in this latest Stanley Cup quest?
“We talk about the penalty kill quite a bit,” Knoblauch said on Thursday. “We are always trying to make adjustments, and through the first two rounds we’ve done a pretty good job of making adjustments that are needed.”
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We did the math — and Knoblauch is right.
In Games 1-3 of the L.A. series, the Kings’ power play went 7-for-12. In Games 3-6, it went 1-for-8.
Against Vegas, the Golden Knights went 3-for-7 in Games 1-2 and were then 0-for-6 for the rest of the series.
This series opened with a win-turned-loss that can be directly blamed on a leaky P.K.
We’re not sure the Oilers will get three or four games to figure that out, this time around.
