Quote:
Originally Posted by Curtsyneil
Oilers beat themselves and the panthers Just sit back a wait to pounce on the mistakes. Plain and simple oilers not good enough tonight to win the game.
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Florida had done plenty of mistakes too. Today was the first breakaway Edmonton capitalized on. They had like 4 or something in the first game, more in the second, but never scored on any of them. Unless you count the only goal they scored last game, two on one.
You can see the weakness and it is basically everywhere but the top guys: Macdee, Dri, Hyman, Hopkins. And those guys are overworked. These four guys and Bouchard have combined 128 points and the rest of the team has 51. Only five guys are in the positive in the +/- category, but nine are negative (most way below and the lowest is -14). Florida’s top five scorers share 89 points between them and the rest of the team has 75; 15 players are positive and 4 below zero (-2 is the lowest). Edmonton’s defense is -23 combined; Florida’s is +32. Frosling, top scoring d-man for Florida, has 12 points but is + 15. Bouchard has a whooping 28 points but is +10 (Nurse is -14 with 4 points). Basically, Florida defense is doing what they are supposed to do and that is defend. Florida came to win the Cup, not score points.
Then see my comments after every game in regard to the ice time of the big guns, they spend at least 8 minutes more on ice than others. They even spend more time on ice than their defensemen do except for Bouchard who is out there to score and assist. Today, Macdee played over 25 minutes, Drai 24, Hyman just short of 24, NH over 22, while Brown, the next forward, play 14 minutes. The previous two games were about the same (the same was true in the previous series). Florida is quite different: Barkov played 20, Reinhart just shy of 20, the next 4 played between 17 and 17:33.
Goaltending… Well…you have to give credit to Skinner because he has done “relatively well” in these series but still never reached 0.900 saves percentage in any of the games. Bob, on the other hand, had his worst game today and ended up with 0.915 - one was a breakaway (he stopped quite a few in these series though and this was the first) and one was some crazy bounce that was never supposed to get inside the net, but as it happens in hockey… Bob will take the Conn Smythe if they win on Saturday, which they should (but Bob is also prone to a bad game now and then and he was hot as hell for the past… no idea, but at least 5 or 6).
So yeah, it just doesn’t look like any of the math is on Oiler’s side. It wasn’t on their side when they played Dallas though either and probably shouldn’t have won (blasphemy!) but they did and here we are. I think Dallas playing Florida would be a much better hockey to watch, to be honest.
To conclude, the only chance for Edmonton to see the Cup is if they lose on Saturday.
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