Four goals should win you a hockey game. Most nights in the NHL, it does, and yet here the Edmonton Oilers are, flying home from San Jose with a 5-4 loss and a defensive zone performance that had been coming for a while now.
"You score three goals in this league, you win most of the time. Four, you should be winning," began head coach Kris Knoblauch. "You shouldn't be forced to score five or six to win hockey games."
Knoblauch is right, and the frustrating part is that everyone in that locker room knows it. The Oilers have the offensive abilities to outscore their problems on a good night, and they've done it plenty of times this season. But relying on that as a survival strategy is exhausting, unsustainable, and eventually — as tonight demonstrated — it stops working altogether.
Before the blame gets distributed, it's worth being specific about where it actually belongs. Connor Ingram was not the problem tonight. One bad goal aside, his performance bore no resemblance to the kind of night Tristan Jarry had in Anaheim, and lumping the two together would be unfair.
The five goals surrendered tonight landed squarely at the feet of the skaters in front of him. Evan Bouchard, surprisingly, was one of the exceptions. He was blocking shots, maintaining puck control, and doing his job as a defenceman while several of his teammates couldn't say the same.
That includes Connor McDavid, which is a sentence that feels almost uncomfortable to write. Defensive responsibility doesn't get a pass based on what a player produces at the other end, and McDavid came up short in his own zone.
The Oilers are a roster so thoroughly wired to attack, so deeply conditioned to value offensive production, that the defensive side of the puck becomes an afterthought until the goals against column forces everyone to reckon with it.
"It is everybody, for sure," said Draisaitl. "Everyone is making the wrong reads right now, and maybe a little bit of (being) fragile on our decision making."
Acknowledging the problem collectively rather than pointing fingers in one direction suggests the room has a clear-eyed view of what's going wrong. Understanding it and fixing it, of course, are two very different things.
"Throughout our lineup there are some (depth) guys that stepped up and made some really good plays tonight. But there are too many mistakes, by too many of us," added Nurse
Knoblauch, meanwhile, zeroed in on something specific that has been costing this team. That is, of course, an inability to keep shots from getting through to the net in the first place.
"Maybe some blocked shots. Some shots that get through. You look at a point shot. It's far away, and it has to get through several layers to get to the net," began Knoblauch with a hint into wear his frustration stems from. "They scored a couple goals like that tonight. That's probably one area I would like to see us get better at."
Point shots sneaking through a crowded neutral lane and trickling past a goaltender who never saw them coming is a persistent problem.
The forwards aren't doing enough to get in shooting lanes, the defence isn't communicating well enough in the neutral zone, and the cumulative effect of those small failures is a goaltender left exposed on shots he should never have to deal with in the first place.
Paul Coffey's return to the bench has sharpened things in certain areas, but tonight was a reminder of how much work remains.
Games like this one also have a predictable side effect of putting goaltending under the microscope, regardless of what actually happened in front of the net. Ingram will field questions about the goal he'd want back, and the broader crease conversation will rumble on in Edmonton despite the fact that his defenders left him hanging for most of the night.
It's an occupational hazard for goaltenders on teams with defensive-zone problems, and the Oilers have had those problems long enough that the pattern is well-established by now.
"It sounds like a broken record, but we're just giving up too many goals," said Draisaitl. "It's hard to score five, six goals every night."
Draisaitl has been saying some version of that for a while now, and the rest of the room seems to see it. It is time, however, to do something about it before the standings get any more unforgiving.
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