Edmonton Oilers inexcusably tepid in well-earned loss to Buffalo Sabres

You can’t win ‘em all, but oh my goodness the Edmonton Oilers needed to win this one.

Their team was finally gaining some momentum with a modest two-game win streak, they were talking about turning corners and gaining confidence, and their next opponent was the Walking Dead — the last-place team in the east, running on fumes.

It should have been a clean kill.

And it was, for the Buffalo Sabres.

On a freezing cold night in Edmonton, the lukewarm Oilers only invested 20 minutes in a game they sorely needed and, guess what, it wasn’t enough.

After falling behind 3-0 through 40 minutes, the Oilers were lucky to grab a point after a wild third-period comeback made possible by a missed icing call on the first goal and Connor McDavid’s equalizer with two seconds left in regulation, but they couldn’t pull this a disaster from the fire and lost 4-3 in overtime.

Alex Tuch scored the winner 33 seconds into the extra period, which begs the question: Are the Oilers back or are they not?

“I guess we can’t answer the question till we see how we’re going to play the next game,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, whose team looked lifeless out of the gate after a pair of convincing wins last week.

“When this team wants to turn it on and play well, most times they can play among the best. But to be one of the best you have to be able to consistently do that. It’s one (rough) game over the last few weeks. I don’t think it’s anything to panic about right now.”

This isn’t a comeback point that you celebrate, it’s a point they never should have let get away. But the Oilers are choosing to see a half-full glass, which is understandable giving the limited range of things they have to feel positive about this year.

“You’d like to play a full 60, especially the way that we’ve been trending in the right direction,” Zach Hyman said of their 4-2-1 run. “The first 40 wasn’t great, but I really liked the group’s push back.

“It’s easy to get down 3-0 and just go away and write the game off. But we didn’t do that. You’re able to claw yourself a point out of game where you put yourself in a hole. So, I think that’s a positive.”

Not caving in when it was 3-0 after 40 is something to cling to, but everyone in the building came to the rink thinking this is one the Oilers had to win.

“That’s what I think,” said Vasily Podkolzin. “We have to win it. They did a good job, they’re a good team. They play strong, they’re a tough team to play against. But we need to have a better start, for sure.”

After 9-4 and 6-2 wins over Seattle and Winnipeg, the Oilers were in search of their longest winning streak of the season, three games, which in and of itself is pretty damning for mid December. The consistency Knoblauch speaks of was nowhere to be found in an unusually tepid start against a team that was ripe for the picking.

All that stuff about playing simple, shooting the puck, going hard to the net, not giving the other team easy goals, they abandoned all of it until they were down 3-0.

“I don’t think we played a bad game, it was just a matter of having a little more energy,” said Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. “We couldn’t find a way to beat them early but we did a great job of clawing our way back.

Why no energy? They hadn’t played since Saturday and had a score to settle with the Sabres.

“I don’t know if you can put your finger exactly on it, but sometimes it’s going to happen that way,” said Nugent-Hopkins. “You have to find a way to get yourself out of it and we did that in the third.”

Last time these teams met it was Edmonton on the wrong end of the schedule, playing their fourth game in six nights in fourth different city. The Oilers got waxed 5-1 in what many thought was the low point of their season, until they lost 9-1 to Colorado and 8-3 to Dallas.

This time it was the Sabres who were run ragged, playing the second of back-to-back games and their third game in four nights. So, the game plan was as simple as it was predictable: Jump on Buffalo early like they did against Winnipeg, break their spirit, run up some goals and call it a night.

A funny thing happened on the way to the blowout, though. By the midway mark of the second period the home team had just 11 shots on net and the only thing their fans had to cheer about was a coach’s challenge that took Buffalo’s 2-0 goal off the board. You can’t script that kind of excitement.

By the end of the second period the hole was three goals deep and the Oilers were standing on the threshold of embarrassment.

“I don’t think we played well enough to win for 60 minutes but I thought we were not terrible,” said Knoblauch. “We just played with a little more urgency, a little more pace to our game (in the third period).”

Edmonton caught a break moments into the third period when the linesman missed an icing call, allowing McDavid to score 10 seconds in. That got the ball rolling, with the building coming to life and Vasily Podkolzin scoring at 1:56. Then, all hope seemed lost, McDavid scored again with two seconds left in regulation.

Yes, they got a point, but there is no real excuse for digging that kind of hole against an opponent in that situatiuon.

“They lost three in a row, they’re on a back-to-back and they gave up seven to Calgary, so you know they’re going to want to defend hard and play hard in front of their goalie. I don’t think it was. Abad game, it was a matter of finding a way to break them down. Eventually we did it but you want to get two points out of it.”

E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com