Game 5 Quick Hits: Murphy's Law

Teeing up Game 6 by looking at the Panthers dominant win

In the last post, I mainly focused on the Oilers zone exits and how that was the catalyst for what’s been going right and wrong for them in this series. My takeaway was that they found something that kind of works by rolling five defenseman with Ekholm, Kulak and Bouchard playing kind of a floater role with different partners, but they’re still playing with fire because they’re banking on one or two negative plays happening to eventually setup a great one when they break the puck out. With the Panthers forecheck in maximum overdrive right now & their defense corps being in the shape it’s in, this is what they have to resort to.

As you can figure out, this did not work in Game 5 even with last change on home ice.

I always go back-and-forth on if this is the losing team playing like trash or the winning team executing their gameplan. The Panthers are good at making a lot of teams look terrible, but a showing like this in the Stanley Cup Final in what’s been a pretty even series is very shocking. Florida played this game on their terms, owned every statistical category and even outplayed the Oilers when the transition game picked up. Some of the issues stem from the Oilers breakout strategy and it leaked over into their more reliable players this game.

While they fixed one issue with moving Kulak back to his strong-side, their best puck-mover Evan Bouchard had an erratic game on exits, failing eight breakouts compared to seven successful ones. Combine that with him Ekholm & Walman all getting beat on different five-on-five goals and it was a nightmare of a game all-around. Bouchard in particular just seemed to be on an island with handling the pressure from the Panthers forwards & it led to Florida sparking their own transition game.

Here’s what it was supposed to look like:

Again, the Oilers aren’t getting a lot of clean breakouts even if Florida’s sending light pressure, so the most they can do is get the puck out of the goal-line area (which the Panthers have dominated), block a shot or force a turnover up high. They do this here & Kulak starts a tip drill type of breakout with McDavid as the first guy into the zone. It’s not ideal, but you’re still getting your best player in the offensive zone with speed and that’s half the battle in a series like this sometimes.

Here’s what it actually looked like more times than not:

Florida did a good job of trapping Bouchard into a corner. Even if he wasn’t directly turning the puck over, there was nowhere for him to go with it & the forwards had to get lower to help him out, which means they had to cover more ground to get out of the zone or chase down loose pucks if they could move it. It’s a double-whammy with McDavid on the ice because it burns up one of his shifts in the defensive zone & the Oilers others lines aren’t picking up the slack.

When the Oilers could get a semi-successful breakout, Bouchard couldn’t make any passes, forcing Kulak to move the puck to a streaking winger out of the zone with McDavid on the defensive side of the puck. What happened a lot this game was Florida picking off these breakouts at the red line & feeding their own rush game. Eventually it led to the Oilers reversing the puck forever until they could setup a controlled breakout behind their own net, which they struggled with all series, and it even led to the 2-0 goal which came off a neutral zone turnover.

We’re so deep in the series that it’s likely not a fixable problem for the Oilers & they just have to hope they can find cracks like they did in Game 4. Even in this game there were opportunities to create off the rush for both McDavid & Draisaitl. They had a combined nine controlled entries with only two scoring chances created between the two of them at five-on-five. Getting four combined shots from your entire winger corps (half of them coming from Connor Brown) will do that. I do like looking at the footage to see if it’s Florida playing impeccible defense or if the Oilers were really just that bad.

Of Draisaitl’s six controlled zone entries & McDavid’s three, this one stuck out the most to me because you see a little of everything. This is also a McDrai shift early in the second period, as Knobloch had to break the emergency glass early in this one. Edmonton tries to enter the zone off a regroup and the give-and-go from him to Perry is already thrown off-kilter because Lundell reads this like a book and the other three Oilers are already preparing for a counter-attack with this play looking DOA from the start. They get it back in the defensive zone after Walman makes a hell of a retrieval against Marchand & McDavid tries another give-and-go with Perry at the opposing blue-line with Seth Jones backing off a little. Perry presumably tries to get this to Ekholm & Marchand reaps the spoils of the loose puck bouncing right to him for a rush shot (a recurring theme in this game).

The Luostarinen-Lundell-Marchand line was playing a little cat-and-mouse game with McDavid & Draisaitl. Pestering them in the neutral zone & forcing turnovers, but where they really got them was allowing them into the zone just enough to bait him into forcing a play into traffic.

It’s somewhat of a risky game because you’re leaving a guy wide open, but with no Zach Hyman & the Oilers wings playing their worst hockey of the playoffs right now, you take your chances with the other team’s stars making impossible 1v3 plays. McDavid was able to do this in Game 1 & Draisaitl almost setup a chance at the end of the clip here that Rodrigues blocked, but this type of matchup is what the Finals are about. Marchand getting the goals is just a bonus for them.

Can they finish the job tonight or do the Oilers have another Game 7 in them?