Reconstructed Oilers pick up pace at right time ...Middle East

DALLAS — The Edmonton Oilers were old, and they were slow.

It was the beginning of The Hangover Season, and Game 7 in Sunrise, Fla. seemed like it had concluded about 15 minutes before Game 1 of the new season. The Oilers were suddenly without four of their fastest players — Dylan Holloway, Ryan McLeod, Warren Foegele and Philip Broberg — and as team speed goes, they were somewhere south of fleet.

“I think you could see it, especially the way we started the year,” admitted Leon Draisaitl. “It felt a little slower, it looked a little slower.”

Stan Bowman hadn’t been on the job long enough to know his secretary’s name when the offer sheet from St. Louis GM Doug Armstrong landed on his desk with a thud. Holloway and Broberg would be lost to the St. Louis Blues in the aftermath, while McLeod was traded to Buffalo and Foegele walked as a free agent to Los Angeles, deemed too expensive to keep.

McLeod and Foegele were in the plans, somewhat. Holloway and Broberg were definitely not, and losing two 23-year-old players left Edmonton longer in the tooth and shorter on foot speed.

The NHL’s best are battling for the right to hoist the Stanley Cup. Watch every game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs on Sportsnet and Sportsnet+.

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“Normally the month of August is really slow,” said Bowman, behind a microphone at a press conference prior to the Western Conference Final — a place we weren’t sure this Oilers team could return to, back in August.

“It was early in August when that happened, and we almost went into trade-deadline mode for that week. We were having meetings every day, analyzing different options…”

But Bowman has always been a sharp rebuilder.

He rebuilt the 2010 Chicago Blackhawks into a Cup winner again in 2013, and did it again the next season, winning a third Cup in 2015. But Edmonton hasn’t won anything yet, and here he was, reconstructing.

He made a sharp play with Vancouver to nab speedy, physical depth winger Vasily Podkolzin for a fourth-round draft pick. As the season wore on, he claimed Kasperi Kapanen, another depth winger who added speed to a lineup that had lost a ton of pace over the summer.

In January, John Klingberg hit the market. It was a flier, but today Klingberg is a vital puck-mover who plays the game fast, providing the break-out with passes that feed the transition the Oilers forwards rely on.

Then at the deadline he added Jake Walman and Trent Frederic — some heft up front and a mobile defender who doesn’t mind playing the body.

None are great players. All are good ones who make the Oilers better.

“We’ve got the fastest player in the game (Connor McDavid), but just one player doesn’t make your team fast,” Bowman said. “It’s not always just about someone that can be fast, like a speed-timed event. It’s someone that can process the game quickly.

“If you can make fast decisions, and you’ve got enough skill, then your team can play fast.”

It was a trendy take, as the Oilers stumbled through another sluggish start to the season, and looked too slow to get back to the Stanley Cup Final. Now, we’re only two rounds in here, but the Oilers have won eight of the past nine games — and nobody across the hockey landscape is looking at this matchup with the Dallas Stars and wondering if Edmonton can skate with its opponent.

Or if they play the game fast enough.

“We added a couple pieces that had really good legs. They brought that (speed), and we needed that,” Draisaitl said. “At the same time, we started to figure out how to play the game faster without having to actually skate that fast, if that makes sense.

“We’re a very experienced group, an older team that plays the game by moving the puck rather than skating it.”

The Oilers figured out Los Angeles for the fourth straight year, adapting their style just enough to thwart the Kings without becoming a team that was foreign to the style that got them into the playoffs. Then they beat Vegas an entirely different way, laying down a smothering defensive effort that limited the Golden Knights to zero goals in Games 4 and 5.

The Oilers have authored a 4-2 road record in these playoffs despite not having scored a power-play goal away from Rogers Place, the most “un-Oiler-like” of statistics. And they beat Vegas in five games with McDavid and Draisaitl averaging just over one point per game — not two or three as you might expect.

Since 2022 they are 16-2 in Games 4-7 of a series, testimony to their ability to feel out an opponent, identify weakness, and be the better team in the games that count the most.

“There were a lot of question marks on what our team was going to be like,” head coach Kris Knoblauch said. “Ultimately, we had two great opponents, difficult opponents, that we had to dig in and battle (against).

“Of course, it doesn’t get any easier now, against Dallas.”

From our viewpoint, I’m not sure how it looks any different this year than last.

Oilers in six.

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