You know opening night didn’t go great when the next day’s headline in the local paper starts with the word(?) “Gaak!” But that is the sort of onomatopoeic ejaculation that follows an 8-1 drubbing in the season opener after a summer of hype like the Edmonton Oilers just enjoyed, and for no real apparent reason. The Oilers are what the Oilers always seem to be\u2014some killer forward lines backed up by precisely three useful defensemen and two question marks in net\u2014and for cap reasons weren’t really able to address either issue. And yet a jarring number of experts are picking Edmonton to finally break through and win a Cup. I get it. There are no true dominant rosters out there, and it’s easy to fall under the spell of this offense when it’s rolling. Hell, I fell for it last year. But what possesses smart people to look at a team with glaring holes in half its game, and which didn’t get better, and say, Yes, this is the year? <\/p>\n
Sixty minutes into the prove-it part of the hype cycle, and the Oilers have proven that they’ve had practice at telling reporters they weren’t good enough on a given night. They had to do it a bunch on Wednesday: Edmonton fell to Vancouver\u2014to Vancouver!\u2014in their season opener while putting together their worst scoreline since Connor McDavid’s rookie year. Brock Boeser scored four goals. J.T. Miller and Elias Pettersson each chipped in four points. Thatcher Demko literally barfed inside his mask and that gave him only the third-worst night of any goalie on the ice: Jack Campbell got yanked after allowing four on 16 shots, and then Stuart Skinner put up the exact same line in relief. There’s going to be a lot of goals in Oilers games this season; the Oilers hope to be responsible for more than 11 percent of them.<\/p>\n