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Shifting gears from a fierce post-season measuring stick game with a Stanley Cup contender on Hockey Night in Canada to a Tuesday night visit from an Eastern Conference afterthought with four wins in its previous 17 games is normally a letdown.
They call them trap games, the kind a team can sleepwalk through for about 55 minutes, putting in just enough effort to put two points in the bank before they move on to play somebody good.
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Or everyone stays asleep and get ambushed.
As luck would have it, it was the Montreal Canadiens and their fans invading Rogers Place — the crowd was almost 50 per cent red, white and blue — so there was a decent buzz in the building instead of just the zzz’s that usually accompany a team sitting 26th overall in the NHL stretch drive.
Unfortunately for Edmonton the energy only extended to the visitors, who skated circles around their sluggish hosts and took a the game into overtime before a four-minute high-sticking penalty set the stage for the Oilers 3-2 win.
With 15 seconds left in the double-minor to Joel Armia for drawing blood on Adam Henrique, Leon Draisaitl won it with a patented one-timer to avoid a complete disaster.
Make no mistake about it, the Oilers got lucky. It was their job to close out a 2-0 third-period lead against a team with four wins since Feb. 10 and they turned it into an adventure.
“This is the normal NHL life toward the end of the year,” said defenceman Mattias Ekholm, who had a strong, two-assist night. “You have some teams that are just trying to make an impression for next year by finishing strong this year and you have some teams that are pushing for spots in the playoffs. That’s just the nature of the schedule and you have to prepare for both.”
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The Oilers weren’t great (12 shots through the first 35 minutes) but staked a 2-0 lead on a first-period goal from Connor McDavid and one in the second period from Adam Henrique, and seemed to have things well in hand at that point.
But they didn’t bring near the effort or intensity they brought a game earlier against the Colorado Avalanche and it caught up with them in the third period.
Nick Suzuki made it 2-1 at the 32-second mark and then Edmonton-born Kaiden Guhle pulled the Canadiens even four minutes later. If not for some fine work from goaltender Calvin Pickard, the Oilers would have been playing catch up all night.
This is the point in the season when the Oilers are supposed to be honing their game for whoever they meet in the first round, not explaining why they got outworked most of the night by a bottom feeder.
“With 15-plus games left here it’s about that time where you’re trying to tweak everything you can and make it as good as you can,” said Ekholm.
CLOSING IN ON COFFEY
Evan Bouchard has 18 points in his last 17 games and sits at 65 on the season. That’s the seventh most points by an Oilers defenceman in a single season. Paul Coffey holds down the top six spots, with 67 points being his sixth-highest total.
ON THE PLUS SIDE
Ekholm is plus-32 on the season. Since joining the Oilers at last year’s trade deadline, he is plus-60 in 85 games, which is the best total in the NHL over that span.
E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com
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