Oilers squander golden opportunity with immature collapse ...Middle East

DALLAS — How do you win 40 minutes of a hockey game, but lose by three?

Well, let’s talk about that…

“We’ve got to be an awful lot more mature than that,” spat Leon Draisaitl, who was for 40 minutes the best player on the ice with a goal and two assists, then became a witness to some horrific penalty killing in the third period, watching from the bench as Dallas scored three power-play goals in the opening six minutes of Period 3.

The Edmonton Oilers had Game 1 of the Western Conference Final in complete control, up 3-1 after two periods and playing a controlled, comfortable game that left little room for the Dallas Stars to breathe.

Then the parade to the penalty box began, and before the third period was six minutes old the Stars had a 4-3 lead.

It was a classic meltdown by the Oilers, or a stunning comeback by Dallas — depending on your point of view. The one thing that can not be argued however, is that this 6-3 win gives Dallas a 1-0 series lead, and the Oilers feel like they let one off the hook here in The Big D.

How does a dominant 40 minutes morph into being dominated in the third?

“We give up three goals in a row on the (penalty) kill,” Draisaitl, said. “It just kills the momentum, and then you’re chasing the game. The game changes from there.”

Where do you lay blame? On the needless penalties, or the brutal penalty killing unit?

“We have to kill better,” said defenceman Darnell Nurse. “We have to be better in that department, all of us, to a man. Whether it’s a won battle, a clear, a block, whatever play has to be made on the PK we have to make it and we didn’t do that enough tonight.

“If we’re not giving Stu the sightline, then we have to block the shot.”

Edmonton reverted to a form not seen over the past nine games, of which they had won eight heading into the series opener. They aided and abetted the Dallas offence, beginning with a Draisaitl turnover that gave Tyler Seguin a breakaway on the Stars’ first goal, before the three consecutive penalties put a smokin’ hot Stars power play in a position to retrieve this game.

It’s funny how a team that has earned the right to use the word “mature” after so many wins this spring can still have a window of immaturity as flagrant as this one.

“You always think you’ve figured it out, and then you get humbled in a hurry,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, smiling slightly. “For us to have the 3-1 lead, things were going our way, and in the third things didn’t go our way. So we’ve just got to put that one behind us, whether we lost 6-3, 1-0 or in overtime. It all means the same.”

Down the hallway, Dallas is as battle-tested as Edmonton, here in the Stars’ third consecutive trip to the West Final. They rescued this one brilliantly, and now hope to hold serve by winning Game 2.

“I think the message right now for all of us is, it’s pretty cool to be here three years in a row. But you don’t get to be here four, five years in a row,” said Seguin. “So you’ve got to find ways on different nights. Whether it’s tonight being down 3-1, or next game being up 3-1 and finishing 5-1. You can’t just try to respond next game. I think the message (after 40 minutes) was, ‘We’ve got to respond right now.’”

The Oilers will wake up in steamy Dallas on Thursday, and they won’t have to squint very hard to see a raft of positives to take away from Game 1 — other than the obvious downer of a game they feel they let get away.

Edmonton was the better team five-on-five in this game, while Draisaitl and Connor McDavid could have put this game away in the opening period, so dominant were Edmonton’s two superstars.

Nurse hit a post moments after the Oilers had gone up 3-1, Zach Hyman hit another with Jake Oettinger cleanly beaten, and of the six Stars goals one was an empty netter, another a lucky bounce of a rebound off of Seguin’s chest, and three came on power plays from penalties that simply did not have to be taken.

A little discipline, a couple of penalty kills, a tad more attention to detail and the Oilers could see a world where they would have won Game 1 — if they simply hadn’t poured the fuel into the rocket ship that was the Dallas Stars in Period 3.

“Obviously we let down out guard for five or six minutes,” said goalie Stuart Skinner, whose game unravelled right alongside his teammates’. “It’s a tough pill to swallow. You just can’t be doing that, especially at playoff time against a team like this. They know how to score goals.”

Nurse put it succinctly:

“Our five-on-five game is really good. We just have to use it more.”

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