Oilers lose, but get their licks in in playoff preview with LA Kings

Well, the suspicions are confirmed — if you take Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman, Mattias Ekholm, Jake Walman, Trent Frederic and Evander Kane out of Edmonton’s lineup, they aren’t going to beat the Los Angeles Kings.

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The experiment played out just the way everyone thought it would Monday night when the Oilers, minus $41.5 million in salary, playing the second of back-to-back games and icing what looked like a training camp road game roster, fell 5-0 to the visiting Kings.

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Shocker.

“Not exactly our lineup and we spent most of the night in the box, so tough to diagnose,” shrugged Oilers forward Connor Brown. “It’s a bit of a wash.”

While it was still mathematically possible for the Oilers to stay in the race for second place, they basically surrendered home-ice advantage to the Kings, electing to play it safe and not expose any more top players to injury than they have to.

Smart play, considering they can’t go more than one game without one of their key players limping into the trainer’s room.

But for as lopsided as the game was (Edmonton had four even-strength shots through 30 minutes) it was still kind of compelling in its own right, with both teams using this as an opportunity to send a message heading into their fourth-consecutive first-round series.

It ran the gamut from chippy to nasty, with Oilers defenceman Darnell Nurse being ejected from the game in the second period for crosschecking Quinton Byfield on the back of the head while he was face down on the ice.

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The physicality didn’t go over well with the Kings.

“They have their B squad and they’re trying to hurt us,” Los Angeles forward Phillip Danault said in a between-periods TV interview.

That’s a bit of whiney quote that certainly got a rise out of Oilers forward Corey Perry, who took exception to both parts of it: B squad and trying to hurt.

“What the (bleep),” spat the Oilers veteran. “Excuse my language, but what do you want us to do? Did he not see what has happened over the last couple of weeks? What does he want us to do? We’re not out there to hurt anybody. Let’s move on.”

Brown felt the same way.

“I’m not really interested in getting into a media war with Danault,” he said. “He took a run at me, I took a run at him. I don’t really have anything to say.”

Byfield left the game and didn’t return for the third period. This one might register on the suspension scale, but with the clown show at NHL Player Safety, you have no idea what warrants supplemental discipline and what doesn’t.

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“It’s a penalty, I have no comments,” said Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch, who didn’t think the game was anything that menacing.

“I don’t think we were running around. We had a couple scrums, but I don’t think it was anything more than a regular game. Obviously there’s some extra tension, with us playing each other (in round one) but I didn’t see a lot more than a typical game.”

Referees Wes McCauley and Jean Hebert seemed particularly afraid that the game might erupt because they called everything that moved — eight minors in the first period and nine more (and a pair of 10-minute misconducts) in the second.

Then, same referees, same two teams, didn’t call a single penalty in the third period. The Kings went 2-for-8 on the power play, the Oilers went 0-for-6.

“Everyone knows what’s ahead of us, a gruelling series, it was a rough one,” said Brown. “But they did a good job of keeping everything under control, they didn’t let anything go.”

On the bright side, there were no new injuries on the Oilers side, so this basically amounted to a win.

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“It was a good night,” grinned Knoblauch. “We haven’t had a good night for a while. Anytime you lose like that are you’re still happy about things, you know it hasn’t been going well in the injury department.”

Knoblauch hasn’t said yet whether McDavid, who is sitting on 99 points for the season, will play the last game of the year Wednesday in San Jose.

“We’ll reevaluate, the game doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “Whether Leon plays or Connor plays or Hyman plays, those are a lot of questions marks. It’s probably not necessary that they do. It’s a possibility they play but I’m not sure what we benefit with them playing.”

LATE HITS —
Monday’s result means virtually nothing, but it is also interesting to note that Edmonton has one goal in its last three games with the Kings. … Edmonton’s lineup consisted of 11 forwards, one of which was freshly-signed winger Quinn Hutson in his NHL debut, and six defencemen, including a bottom pairing of Josh Brown and Cam Dineen… Kings goalie Darcy Kuemper had a shutout going with 12 minutes to play but they pulled him out of the game and inserted David Rittich.

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