Oilers Suddenly With Huge Opportunity — If They Can Take Advantage

The Edmonton Oilers finally get to breathe a little. After grinding through the toughest opening schedule in the NHL, the team now enters a two-week window that could completely reshape their season—if they take advantage of it.

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Saturday’s win over the Florida Panthers wrapped up a grueling seven-game, 13-day road trip, sealing a 3-3-1 record and pushing Edmonton to 10-9-5 through 24 games. It wasn’t often pretty, and the schedule doesn’t excuse what often looked like a team going through the motions, but the Oilers escaped mostly unharmed.

That may not look impressive on paper, but context matters. No one in the league has played more hockey (the Oilers have played 24 games), and no one has been forced to live out of a suitcase quite like this group. Sixteen of their first 24 games came on the road, including a seven-game trip and the marathon eastern swing that had fans circling it months ago as a potential season-killer.

The team spent just five full days in Edmonton this month. With the team constantly traveling, practice time has been nearly nonexistent. Fatigue, lack of reps, and constant time-zone hopping have played a role in their energy levels, and extra minutes for the top guys haven’t helped. The Oilers didn’t have a big cushion thanks to a poor October, so it was important to get out of November without having dug a hole so deep that getting out looked like an impossible task.

The Oilers’ Schedule Gets a Lot More Friendly

But now the schedule finally turns.

The Oilers are off Sunday, don’t play again until Tuesday, and then get three more off-days before heading to Seattle on Saturday. December opens with a five-game homestand featuring beatable opponents: Minnesota, Seattle, Winnipeg, Buffalo, and Detroit. If there’s ever been a moment to make up ground, it’s now.

The Oilers have learned that nothing comes easy. As long as they continue to struggle finding their game — and, no, they haven’t found it yet — nothing is a given. To say that things get easier also assumes that the Oilers resemble a roster that looked more like the team that played Tampa and Florida than the one that played Colorado or Buffalo.

Edmonton sits tied with Utah for a wild-card spot, and a short winning streak would put them right back in the hunt in the Pacific Division. The first 24 games were about survival. Now comes the opportunity. The Oilers just need to seize it.

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