Oilers Gameday – @ Chicago

The Oilers are in Chicago tonight. They are looking to restart their win streak and reclaim the playoff spot they held, albeit briefly. I’m looking for a Taylor Hall hat trick and a Cam Talbot shutout, but I’m willing to settle for a Hall goal and an Oilers W.

Last Games

Edmonton

The Oil dropped Tuesday’s game 4-2 to the Rangers. I didn’t watch much of it, but from what I gathered it was a pretty lacklustre effort on both sides and no one deserved to win. Taylor Hall returned to his scoring ways, and that made me happy. In fact, I’m pretty sure I retweeted something about him with the tagline “King of my heart”. No shame, at all.

Chicago

Without looking, I’m going to guess that they won, and Patrick Kane got a point and extended his streak to eleventy billion games.

*checks*

NOPE. They lost 3-0, to Colorado. Hah.

Keys to the Game

Edmonton

Probably need to tighten up in the defensive zone, and maybe not let the Blackhawks run roughshod over them? Talbot’s going to need some help on the back end, so that’s the thing they should work on.

Chicago

I have no idea. I haven’t watched them play much, but I imagine they’re pretty good. I’d say they need to keep Edmonton from getting an early lead, because that seems to be the thing the Oilers are pretty decent at capitalizing on.

Players to Watch

Edmonton

Taylor Hall.

Why, you ask? 35 points in 32 games (1.09 ppg), 4th in league scoring, 1st in game winning goals (with 5) and TWO POINTS away from 300 for his career. he’s the second in his draft class to hit that milestone (Tyler Seguin did it first because he hasn’t spent the first 5 years of his career on garbage teams. HE HAS A STANLEY CUP!). BUT all things being equal (especially taking into consideration the number of games Hall has missed due to injury), Hall would have surpassed that last season.

Whatever. Don’t take my word for it. Pierre LeBrun at ESPN wrote some great stuff about Hall today, and you can read it here.

Chicago

Watch Toews. Watch Hossa. He’s an old man playing like a kid and it’s great. Or anyone, really. But don’t watch Patrick Kane. Just…don’t. (Fortunately, now that his point streak has been snapped we don’t have to hear about that anymore either.)

Lineups

Edmonton

Taylor Hall – Leon Draisaitl – Teddy Purcell

Jujhar Khaira – Ryan Nugent-Hopkins – Jordan Eberle

Matt Hendricks – Mark letestu – Lauri Korpikoski

Luke Gazdic – Anton Lander – Iiro Pakarinen

Darnell Nurse – Andrej Sekera

Nikita Nikitin – Justin Schultz

Brandon Davidson – Eric Gryba

Cam Talbot

Chicago

Teuvo Teravainen – Jonathan Toews – Marian Hossa

Artemi Panarin – Artem Anisimov – Patrick Kane

Bryan Bickell – Dennis Rasmussen – Andrew Shaw

Brandon Mashinter – Marcus Kruger – Andrew Desjardins

Duncan Keith – Trevor van Reimsdyk

Niklas Hjalmarsson – Brent Seabrook

Rob Scuderi – Michal Rozsival

Corey Crawford? Scott Darling? (I don’t know….)

Final Thoughts

It was mentioned to me that if I were to write a book about hockey, someone would read it. (Thanks @srheth for the vote of confidence!) I was telling my dad about this last night, and he agreed, which is surprising because his response to my first gameday post this season was “Congratulations. You have mastered the art of saying very little using many words.” I remember laughing uproariously at that, and sharing it with the other writers here who also thought it was pretty funny.

But that conversation got me thinking. What authority do I have to write about hockey at all? Sure, I’ve won the Stanley Cup playing street hockey dozens of times, but that’s about all the experience I have. I don’t have an insider’s look at anything, I’m not particularly interested in advanced stats, I’ve never played the game.

The more I think about that though, the more I realize it doesn’t matter. You know who else never played the game at any appreciable level? Mark Spector. And you know what? He gets PAID to talk and write about hockey, a sport he sometimes appears to have very little knowledge of or interest in. You can go do some looking on your own, but basically he’s been talking about how the Oilers (Nugent-Hopkins in particular) are soft, which has of course spawned a bunch of twitter commentary about how not soft the team actually is. Spector’s also a noted Alex Burrows apologist, (which is abhorrent based on what I read today), AND he prompted me to write over 1200 words about institutionalized sexism based on an INCREDIBLY ignorant comment he made about female politicians.

I guess the thing that gets me is this: Spector gets paid to cover this team. Which means he gets paid to watch hockey (what a dream) and yet, sometimes the best he can come up with is “Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is soft.”

If that’s all it takes to write about hockey and get paid, I’m all in.

Note: I was going to write a whole lot more, but a quick twitter search revealed the most amazing thing, and I’m going to leave it right here:

In my case, unlike yours, the word “again” applies https://t.co/qLBMWn7vC2

— Alan Strachan (@winsford99) December 16, 2015