It’s taken no small amount of blood, sweat and tears by the Edmonton Oilers as they look to mirror a season-high eight-game win streak when they take on the Chicago Blackhawks on the road Tuesday.
And you better believe it’s a far cry better after finding a way to add blood and sweat to the mixture in a season that began as nothing but tears on the way to a franchise-worst 2-9-1 start.
Since then, the Oilers have added bandages and ice packs to their previous supply of Kleenex after new bench boss Kris Knoblauch has them stringing together wins faster than any rookie head coach in league history.
With Saturday’s 3-1 win over the Eastern Conference basement-dwelling Ottawa Senators, Knoblauch became the first NHL head coach to put together two winning streaks of at least seven games in his first 25 outings, leading the team to a 17-6 as the Oilers surge into the playoff picture.
“Our goal was to get into that picture,” Knoblauch said of the turnaround. “The timeline? It’s definitely happened a lot quicker than we assumed. Back in Washington (in late November), we talked about our goal, what we had to do to get in and it was eight-game segments.
“We had to plug it out, if we went 5-3 we would get there.”
Never mind going 5-3. That 5-0 shutout over the Capitals on Nov. 24 turned into an eight-game win streak as Knoblauch has them on a 15-3 clip since, stringing together wins at an unprecedented pace.
“I had no idea,” Knoblauch said of his record run of streaks out of the gate. “I’m happy the team’s winning and playing well and it was only a matter of time before they started winning games, no matter what my message was.
Hopefully we’ve got many more seven-game winning streaks.”
But the wins haven’t come easily. Or painlessly either.
On Saturday, Evan Bouchard assisted on all three goals of Zach Hyman’s hat-trick performance on his way to a team-leading 25 goals. Along the way, Bouchard paid the price by hitting his face into the boards behind the Oilers net while in a footrace for the puck late in the second period, suffering a cut on his chin that was still bloody when he spoke to the media post-game.
“It’s great, never been better,” he smiled when asked about the gash. “I kind of just fell into basically the dasher.”
Bouchard wasn’t the only Oilers defenceman to face the sweet chin music. Darnell Nurse took a particularly vicious shot off his left foot, while Cody Ceci ended up blocking a shot with his cheek late in the third period.
“It’s never good thoughts, you’re pretty scared,” Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner said of seeing Ceci go down. “Especially when it’s the head, that’s the most important thing that we have, especially for a guy like him. We love him, we adore him in this locker-room and he’s obviously an incredible player.
It says a lot about a guy when he gets hit in the face, just right in the cheek, pure skin, and he comes back the next shift and he blocks about four more pucks. So, that takes a lot of guts and that’s one of the many reasons why we really love him here.”
Fortunately, no one suffered more than bumps and bruises Saturday, considering such sacrifices are both par for the course and well worth the price of admission as the victories pile up as high as the ice bags.
“There should be some pain with a winning streak,” Knoblauch said.
The Oilers currently sit two wins off of a franchise-record nine-game streak as they take to the road this week, following up Tuesday’s stop in Chicago (6:30 p.m., Sportsnet) with a game Thursday against the Detroit Red Wings and Saturday against the Montreal Canadiens.
