In the first round, it took a tying goal with 6:42 to go in the third period of Game 3 and a failed coach’s challenge opening the door for the winner against the Kings to prevent the Oilers from falling into a 3-0 hole in the best-of-7 series.
They needed a late tying goal with 29 seconds remaining and an overtime winner by Draisaitl in Game 4, which really set the wheels in motion for the Oilers.
“LA was a good team and they won the first two games and there was a lot of uncertainty, we had a lot of guys coming back from injury,” Knoblauch said. “Kane hadn’t played, Frederic was coming off a long injury, so many guys were just kind of getting together.”
Knoblauch put together new line combinations and defensive pairings not used in the regular season to start the playoffs. He had to resort to a goaltending change after the second game in Los Angeles, starting Calvin Pickard over Stuart Skinner.
The move worked, as did seemingly every other lineup change Edmonton made.
“We didn’t have much time to jell, we needed to figure it out pretty soon and everyone stepped up at different times, whether it was Calvin Pickard coming in and winning some important games for us early on in the LA series and Vegas, Stu coming in and picking up where we expected him to play at,” Knoblauch said. “Even Jeff Skinner tonight, coming up and scoring a goal after not being in the lineup for so long. We have a lot of guys that have contributed, which really feels good.”
Now the key is to keep it going in the Cup Final against the toughest opponent the Oilers will face in the postseason.
“I think it’s fun to be in this situation and have the opportunity to go back to where we were last year,” Oilers defenseman Darnell Nurse said. “It’s a group that I think we were jelling, we believed in ourselves from the start of the playoffs, no matter how things were going, no matter what was going on, it’s a group that’s very resilient, a group that believes in each other and we earned ourselves an opportunity to go back to the Cup Final, but there’s a lot of work to be done.”
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