Edmonton Oilers turn Bizarro World start into a painful lesson

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It happens.

Good boxers get knocked out. Good golfers miss the cut. Good chefs burn the chicken.

And good hockey teams will soil the sheets occasionally.

Well, one of those occasions was the first period Thursday evening in Pittsburgh, which the Edmonton Oilers turned into Bizarro World — doing the exact opposite of everything that had been working so well for them on that 15-3-1 charge.

“We weren’t ready,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, uttering a phrase he hasn’t been forced to use in a long time. “They outworked us, outskated us, the attention to detail wasn’t there.

“We had a heck of a game against Boston and tonight we absolutely took off the first 20 minutes and the deficit was too big for us to overcome.”

If the Oilers were getting a little complacent, thinking things might come easily or that the Penguins would bow down because they lost the last seven meetings by a combined score of 37-9, they got slapped to attention early in this one.

They were down 3-0 in the first 10 minutes to a Pittsburgh team missing Evgeni Malkin and trailed 5-1 early in the second period. The hottest team in the league looked like Mike Tyson fumbling for his mouthguard on the canvas and wondering where he was after taking Buster Douglas lightly.

“Obviously not the start we wanted,” sighed defenceman Mattias Ekholm. “I thought we came out better in the second and gained some ground on them, but at the end of the night we can’t dig ourselves that big of a hole. We certainly had to pay the price tonight.”

They came to life and made a fight of it, outshooting the Penguins 36-13 over the final two periods and closing it to 5-3 on the second of the night from Leon Draisaitl and one from Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

But there would be no recovering from whatever that was in the first period, which was a complete 180 from what we’ve seen from this team for the better part of two months.

After holding their opponents to three or fewer goals in 16 of their previous 19 games, the Oilers gave up four in the first period.

After holding Seattle to three shots and Boston to four in the first period of the last two games, they gave up 13 in the opening 20 minutes to the Penguins.

The recent numbers that had Stuart Skinner rocketing up the goaltending charts? He had a .692 save percentage in the first period.

The tight defence that had been shutting down the best teams in the league served up two Penguins goals from wide-open players shooting from point-blank range.

The part about McDavid and Draisaitl not having to shoulder the entire offensive load anymore? McDavid set up all three goals and Draisaitl scored two of them.

It happens. But this one came out of nowhere.

“We expect a lot better out of ourselves to start games, we pride ourselves on that,” said defenceman Brett Kulak. “They were faster, they were putting pucks in and forechecking hard and coming hard to the net. It was as simple as that.”

After playing a near-perfect game in shutting out the Bruins 4-0, this looked more like the team that was about to win Taylor Hall in the 2010 draft lottery.

“Nothing surprises me in hockey anymore,” said Knoblauch. “You can put together a big string of games, play an unbelievable game and the next one you’re not ready.

“The last 40 minutes was a really good effort, we had our chances to get back into it and without some goal posts maybe tie it up at some point, but it was too big to overcome.”

The Oilers bought themselves more than enough benefit of the doubt over the last while to know this was a temporary glitch in the matrix. But they did miss out on an opportunity to keep pace with the first place Vegas Golden Knights in the chase for home ice in the playoffs.

Against a Pittsburgh team they always beat for fun, it was a costly blunder.

“I’ve been in this league long enough to know that a lot of things don’t make sense in this league,” said Ekholm. “If you’re trying to puzzle them together it’s hard and I don’t think it’s worth it.

“We had a good effort in Boston and good effort in Seattle and followed that up with not so good effort tonight.

“Sometimes they come and go. It’s a long season and we can learn from it. That’s the most important thing. It wasn’t to our standard and that was the end of that.

“We have a chance for a 3-1 road trip (with a win in Chicago Saturday), which is pretty good. That’s the focus right now.”

E-mail:?rtychkowski@postmedia.com