Twice. The Edmonton Oilers have now lost to the Buffalo Sabres twice this season. The same Buffalo Sabres who sit near the bottom of the Eastern Conference. The same Sabres who are 2-9-2 on the road. The same team that lost 7-4 to Calgary the night before coming to Rogers Place.

And yet, here we are again.

Except this time, facing a near-unanimous assessment from the locker room that they didn't actually play that badly. Back on November 17, the Oilers came into KeyBank Center and got handed a 5-1 defeat. They looked flat, disorganized, and thoroughly outplayed.

Fast forward to Tuesday night at Rogers Place, and the Oilers were coming off consecutive wins where they'd scored 15 combined goals. They were playing at home, riding momentum, facing a struggling road team on the second night of a back-to-back. Everything pointed to redemption.

Instead, they got another loss. But according to the room, they weren't far off.

"You'd like to play a full 60, especially the way we've been trending," added Zach Hyman.

Yah, that'd be nice

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The Oilers entered the game averaging 3.31 goals per game, ranking sixth in the NHL with 96 total goals through 29 games. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl were doing their thing. And things were on the up

But hockey isn't played on spreadsheets, and the Sabres proved that depth and desperation are enough. 

"They play us hard," Hyman noted. "Every team in the league now is a good league. The standings are closer than they maybe ever have been. There are no bad teams anymore. That's just the way it is."

He's not wrong.

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Ryan Nugent-Hopkins offered perhaps the most revealing perspective. "I don't think we played a bad game," he said. "It's just a matter of having a little more energy, and they obviously didn't want to give anything up, and we couldn't find a way to beat them early. But, I mean, we did a great job of clawing our way back."

He's also not wrong.

They weren't bad, just not quite good enough. A matter of energy and timing rather than fundamental problems. It speaks to how thin the margins are in today's NHL, but it also raises questions about what separates winning performances from losing ones.

Oilers Relaxed Schedule Pays Dividends There's no excuse for being bad in the NHL. You're playing against the best players in the world, getting paid millions of dollars, and fans expect results regardless of circumstances. But if we're being honest, there are varying degrees of difficult, and the <a href="https://thehockeynews.com/nhl/edmonton-oilers#google_vignette">Edmonton Oilers</a> got absolutely hammered by the schedule to start this season.

"Like I said, I don't think it was a bad game for us," Nugent-Hopkins continued. "It was just a matter of finding a way to break them down. And eventually we did it. But you want to get to it a little earlier, if anything."

Performance wasn't the problem, but execution in a slow first 40 minutes was. 

"Overall, I thought we did a pretty good job," said Knoblauch. "I don't like the fact that we took six penalties, and that took away a lot of our game. But when this team wants to turn it on and play well, most times they can play amongst the best, but to be one of the best, you got to be able to consistently do that. But I think there's nothing to panic about right now."

Even Knoblauch framed it within "I thought we did a pretty good job." It's a consistent message from the room: we weren't bad, we just didn't get it done. And there's probably truth to that. The Oilers likely weren't as terrible as the result suggests, just as Buffalo probably isn't as good as their two wins over Edmonton might indicate.

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Or maybe the standard for "not bad" needs to be higher when you're icing a roster with this much talent. Not as an indictment, but as a recognition that "pretty good" might not be enough when you're trying to separate yourself from the pack.

The Oilers face Detroit on Wednesday at Rogers Place, then hit the road for Toronto, Montreal, Pittsburgh, and Boston. The schedule doesn't ease up, and the margin for error remains razor-thin in a league where, as Hyman noted, there really aren't any easy nights anymore.

As Knoblauch said, there's nothing to panic about. The team isn't broken, the system isn't failing, and the talent is undeniable. But somewhere between "we didn't play bad" and losing to Buffalo twice is a lesson worth learning. Whether it's about discipline, energy, or simply finding ways to finish off supposedly easy teams.

The Oilers have 53 games left. Buffalo has shown them twice now what happens when you're close but not quite there. How they respond will tell us whether "we didn't play bad" becomes a rallying cry for improvement or just another explanation for results that should've gone differently.

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