With a 5-2 loss on Saturday night, the Edmonton Oilers are on the verge of elimination in the Stanley Cup Finals.
It’s been yet another roller-coaster of a series for Edmonton. They’ve had some dramatic comebacks and some extremely close overtime games, but they’ve also trailed for a significant chunk of this series. Now, they must win two consecutive games or lose to the Florida Panthers in the Cup Final for the second straight season.
Without further ado, here are six thoughts heading into Game 6 on Tuesday night.
*All stats via EvolvingHockey unless stated otherwise
In the 2024 Stanley Cup Final, the Oilers went 2-1 at Rogers Place, scoring a whopping 16 goals in those three games. But on the contrary, the Oilers went 1-3 at Amerant Bank Arena, scoring just seven goals in those four games and just two goals in Games 1, 2 and 7 combined.
In Florida, Paul Maurice held last change and decided to hard-match Aleksander Barkov’s line and the Gustav Forsling – Aaron Ekblad pair against Connor McDavid’s line. This strategy evidently worked, as McDavid had just a single 5-on-5 point in four games at Florida, most notably getting shut out in the critical Game 7.
There are several reasons as to why the Oilers lost the finals last season, but I believe Florida having home-ice advantage was a critical one. They simply could not figure out and break through Maurice’s line-matching on the road.
But this time around, Edmonton possessed home-ice advantage, finishing higher than the Panthers in the regular-season standings. Heading into this series, I thought the key to victory for the Oilers would be to continue holding a winning record at home, while winning at least one game in Florida.
Unfortunately, they lost Game 2 and Game 5 at Rogers Place. And now, if they want to win this series, they will need to go 2-1 at Florida. Simply put, it’s a huge shame that the Oilers completely wasted their home-ice advantage, something that could have made a huge difference last season. Kris Knoblauch had a real opportunity here to use the last change to his advantage, but he just never did.
Of course, the Oilers did win Game 4 in Amerant Bank Arena, but they began the game down 3-0 and won in overtime off a fortunate bounce. Will the Oilers be able to repeat this sort of performance on Tuesday? Only time will tell.
A big reason why the Oilers thoroughly dominated against the Dallas Stars in the 2025 Western Conference Finals was due to the fact they were almost never behind. In that series, the Stars led for a mere 14 minutes and two seconds, all of which came in the third period of Game 1. Through Games 2 to 5, the Stars did not possess the lead for even a single second.
But that has been far from the case in this year’s Stanley Cup Final.
The Panthers have led at some point in every game of this series, and have led by multiple goals in four of the five games. Florida has led for more than a whopping 200 minutes, compared to a mere 33:51 for Edmonton.
The dramatic comebacks are fun and all, but it goes without saying that this is simply not a strategy for success. These slow starts have been a recurring problem for quite some time, dating back to the beginning of the 2023-24 season.
There’s not much else to say here. This team absolutely has the ability to play a full 60 minutes, but so far, they’ve yet to do that. Simply put, Edmonton needs to come out guns blazing in the first period of Game 6.
Kris Knoblauch and Paul Coffey have shuffled around the defensive pairs quite a lot in this series.
They began the series with pairs of Mattias Ekholm – Evan Bouchard, Darnell Nurse – Brett Kulak, and Jake Walman – John Klingberg. But following significant struggles from Nurse, Kulak and Klingberg at moving the puck against Florida’s forecheck, the Oilers mixed it up for Games 4 and 5, pairing Bouchard with Kulak, Walman with Ekholm, and then inserting Troy Stecher into the lineup next to Nurse in place of Klingberg.
These were exactly the pairs I desired to see prior to Game 4. Edmonton has performed well with Bouchard on-ice at 5v5, but without him, they have greatly struggled. My logic (and I’m assuming the logic of the coaching staff as well) was that Kulak and Bouchard already had excellent results as a pair against Dallas; pairing them together then allows you to let Ekholm help the team during the non-Bouchard minutes.
Did this strategy work? Well, not exactly.
In Game 4, Knoblauch and Coffey decided to bench Stecher for most of the game, and so the Oilers primarily ran with five defencemen, not exactly testing those three pairings. And in Game 5, Ekholm made two major gaffes on the first two goals against, ultimately causing the coaching staff to revert back to the Ekholm and Bouchard pair.
So, all things considered, what pairs should the Oilers run here?
