The Oilers’ season is over much earlier than most people thought, including those around the team.
The Golden Knights were technically the favourites in Round 2 considering they had home-ice advantage, but it sure didn’t feel that way.
Not with the Oilers going 14-0-1 to finish the season. Not with three players on the roster with more than 100 points. Not with the league’s top power play, the best of all time. Not with the Golden Knights’ goaltending situation in flux.
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The series was there for the taking, too. Instead, the Oilers crumbled for key stretches in the final two games and lost. There’s lots of blame to go around. Lots.
Here are the issues, ranked.
The officiating
The referring wasn’t a travesty from this vantage point even if some of the calls and non-calls were puzzling in Game 6. But let’s just say the standard of officiating didn’t work in the Oilers’ favour for at least three of the games — including Sunday’s.
The Oilers dominated special teams in this series. Their power play — which looked unstoppable in the Kings series by scoring on nine of its 16 opportunities — went 9-for-23 against the Golden Knights. That still elite 39.1 percent success rate is deflated by garbage-time advantages late in blowouts, too.
It’s also worth noting that their penalty kill allowed just four goals on 24 Vegas chances.
However, there were three games in the series where the Oilers got three power plays or fewer. Naturally, they lost each of those contests, including Sunday’s clincher where they were afforded just one chance.
Referees put their stamp on games whether they call penalties or not. The five-on-five portion of the series was owned by the Golden Knights throughout the series, at least from a goals-for perspective, minus Game 4. Not calling penalties worked to their benefit.
Sunday’s game was reminiscent of Game 7 of the 2011 Eastern Conference finals. The Lightning had excellent special teams. The Bruins had an awful power play and an average penalty kill. Zero penalties were called in that game. Boston won 1-0.
Likewise, there’s no question that the whistles going away hurt the Oilers.
Cause of defeat: 7/10
Five-on-five issues
Let’s flip the script then, shall we? Traditionalists who like rough-and-tough playoff hockey where only high sticks, pucks over the glass and infractions that negate clear-cut scoring chances are called will probably look at the Oilers and put the blame on them.
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There’s a degree of truth to that logic considering the Oilers were outscored 15-9 at five-on-five in the series. It’s hard to win a series that way.
Really, though, the Oilers didn’t play that badly in that capacity. Per Natural Stat Trick, the Oilers had 55 percent of the shot attempts, 54 percent of the high-danger attempts and 53 percent of the expected goals.
What it came down to was they didn’t finish off enough of their chances and, most pointedly, they didn’t get enough saves.
Cause of defeat: 6/10
Skinner’s goaltending
What a rough postseason it was for Stuart Skinner. Whenever there was a hint of progress, things got worse. It was one step forward, two steps back for a month.
The Vegas series was the low point. Skinner was pulled in the last two games and three times over the last four contests — naturally, all losses. He allowed 19 goals on 152 shots through six contests for a paltry .875 save percentage.
Even a couple more stops by the rookie and we’re discussing a Game 7 on Tuesday night in Vegas rather than dissecting the series and season that was. Heck, we might even be analyzing the Oilers’ Western Conference finals matchup.
There’s no question that Skinner wasn’t good enough against Vegas. He knows it. Everyone knows it.
Cause of defeat: 8.5/10
Jack Campbell and Stuart Skinner (Stephen R. Sylvanie / USA Today)
Not starting Campbell
This has been a hot topic among Oilers fans for several days amid Skinner’s struggles and Jack Campbell replacing him adequately in garbage time.
Let’s acknowledge right off the bat that Campbell deserves credit for holding down the fort in difficult situations. Most importantly, his major relief work in Game 4 against the Kings allowed the Oilers to come back and earn a pivotal victory. He had a .961 save percentage in 118 minutes throughout the playoffs.
Was that effort in Los Angeles or any of Campbell’s mop-up duty enough to warrant him starting a game in the Vegas series? That, I’m not so sure.
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Campbell was one of the worst goaltenders in the NHL all season. There were a handful of decent appearances, but really it was only in his last two starts against the Ducks that he looked competent. Let’s check where the Ducks finished in the standings. Oh yeah, dead last.
This wasn’t a choice like Bruins coach Jim Montgomery had to make where he had Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman effectively rotating all season. No, the crease was Skinner’s from before American Thanksgiving onward because he was going, and Campbell wasn’t.
Provided Campbell returns to the Oilers — highly likely given his cap hit ($5 million) and remaining term (four years) — there’s reason to believe he can be a much better goaltender than he was this season.
We’ll never know if that process truly would have been expedited in these playoffs with a few strong starts. From this vantage point, it feels more like a pie-in-the-sky outcome than a realistic one.
Cause of defeat: 2/10
Losing key matchups
It seemed like every decision Jay Woodcroft made in Round 1 worked splendidly.
He put Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl together at the right time. He found success by putting Nick Bjugstad with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman. He stuck with Skinner after a rough Game 3.
Woodcroft didn’t have the same impact against the Golden Knights. Oilers fans are also all over Woodcroft, criticizing him for the Skinner-Campbell situation and for being outcoached by Vegas counterpart Bruce Cassidy.
The goaltending dilemma has already been discussed. We wrote that starting the series with McDavid and Draisaitl apart rather than together would have been more advantageous, but at least Woodcroft diverted from that plan after Game 3.
As for Game 6, Woodcroft was intent on keeping McDavid’s and Draisaitl’s lines away from William Karlsson. And for good reason considering the two superstars had scored with Karlsson on the ice in the playoffs.
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The matchup limited McDavid to 5:21 in the first period. That’s not enough even without the benefit of a power play. Again, Woodcroft course corrected, and McDavid played 24 minutes with the Oilers having just one trip to the man advantage. Draisaitl skated for almost 25 minutes.
This wasn’t Mike Babcock’s usage of Auston Matthews in an elimination game or anything.
Was Woodcroft perfect? No. But did his decision cost the Oilers the series? I’d give the same answer.
Instead, I’d point to a few key players.
Cause of defeat: 3/10
Top-six woes
This was the crux of my postgame column following the season-ending loss, so I’d invite you to read that story if you haven’t already.
To quickly summarize, several key forwards did very little in this series.
Nugent-Hopkins and Evander Kane were front and centre there. Ditto for Draisaitl over the final four games after he scored six times in the first two contests. Hyman was limited by injury. Kailer Yamamoto wasn’t always in the top six, but that’s because he rarely showed he deserves to be there.
The die is just about cast when it comes to Yamamoto. A top-two-line right winger is a key position to upgrade this offseason.
The Oilers were supposed to have more elite skill than the Golden Knights. They didn’t show that.
Cause of defeat: 9/10
The Nurse-Ceci pair
Darnell Nurse and Cody Ceci were supposed to be the shutdown duo. That couldn’t have been further from the case against the Golden Knights.
The Oilers were outscored 7-2 with Nurse on the ice at five-on-five. The deficit was even uglier with Ceci skating — an 8-1 gap. They have a thankless role, but there was no reason to thank them for their efforts in this series.
Here’s the thing: this pair has struggled all season. Each player has done better away from the other. Woodcroft sprinkled in all other blueliners for Nurse, but he pretty much had to stick with the Nurse-Ceci pair once Mattias Ekholm and Evan Bouchard formed such a great marriage.
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The one potential solution was to move Brett Kulak up with Nurse and drop Ceci down to the third period. But that would have meant Ceci playing with Philip Broberg because it’s hard to envision how things could have worked with Vincent Desharnais, a fellow righty.
This is more of an issue of roster composition than deployment. The Oilers got a great first season from Ceci after he signed as a free agent in July 2021. The concern was how many more solid years they’d get from him.
He’s a trade candidate because a top-four right-handed defenceman is a clear need this summer.
When it comes to this series, to make matters worse, Nurse and Ceci lost their momentum the one time it seemed like they found their footing together.
Cause of defeat: 8/10
Darnell Nurse (Stephen R. Sylvanie / USA Today)
Nurse’s lapse of judgment
Nurse getting suspended couldn’t have come at a much worse time.
The Oilers played probably their best game of the series in Game 4 and were cruising to victory. Then, in the last minute of play, Nurse decided to fight Nicolas Hague — the Golden Knights defenceman he’d been jawing at continuously.
Nurse glided in from the top of the circle to behind the Vegas net and grabbed Hague, who was already engaged in a board battle with Warren Foegele. It wasn’t the most egregious instigation of a fight considering how quickly Hague dropped his gloves, but it was that by the rule book.
Nurse should have picked his spot more carefully or been smarter about how he went about fighting Hague. He received a one-game ban for his actions.
Though the Golden Knights played Game 5 without their top defenceman, Alex Pietrangelo, the result of a vicious slash on Draisaitl, it certainly appeared as though the Oilers missed Nurse more. Broberg took two penalties and was only trusted enough to play six minutes in a 4-3 loss, which left the Oilers facing elimination.
Nurse’s suspension didn’t crush the Oilers, but it certainly put them in a hole.
Cause of defeat: 4/10
The Nurse and Pietrangelo suspensions
Nurse’s suspension was right there in the rule book, about as clear as you can get. The decision to give him an instigator penalty was a subjective one by the referees, but it’s hard for the NHL to show them up by rescinding that call the next day. From what I’ve been told, it was barely considered — if at all.
The real subjective call was the choice to ban Pietrangelo and for how long. The Department of Player Safety made the right call by suspending the Golden Knights defenceman, but that decision looked toothless after he and Nurse got the same punishment.
I get the challenges at play here. Again, Nurse’s penance was pretty much set in stone. Pietrangelo’s wasn’t. The player safety headed up the review for one issue but not the other. There’s the multiplier of missing playoff games compared to those in the regular season. Pietrangelo is a top player who doesn’t have a suspension history.
But a woodchopping motion that very easily could have severely injured Draisaitl — who, oh yeah, is another top player, at the end of the blowout game — shouldn’t have had the same penalty as what Nurse did. There’s just no way, especially since Nurse’s suspension was announced first.
It was off-ice game management at its finest.
Imagine for a minute that the Oilers played Game 6 with Nurse and the Golden Knights had to manage without Pietrangelo. The outcome could have been much different.
Cause of defeat: 5/10
The playoff format
The Golden Knights were the top team in the Western Conference. The Oilers were No. 2. This series should have been played for the right to move on to the Stanley Cup Final.
This has no bearing on why the Oilers lost, of course, unless the Golden Knights become so thinned out in net that Jonathan Quick winds up between the pipes at some point next round.
It’s just that this series — probably the most entertaining of the playoffs so far — is Exhibit A for why the NHL should go back to a one-versus-eight playoff format.
Cause for defeat: 1/10
(Top photo: Paul Swanson / NHLI via Getty Images)