Stanley Cup Playoffs Day 40: Oilers score five straight to rally from down 2-0 and tie West Final

Scott Maxwell
Scott Maxwell
Edmonton Oilers players
Credit: © Perry Nelson

After blowing a 2-0 lead on home ice in Game 3, the Edmonton Oilers clearly needed to make some changes if they wanted to prevent this Western Conference Final series against the Dallas Stars from slipping away from them. Their move? Swapping out Vincent Desharnais and Sam Carrick for Philip Broberg and Corey Perry, and then splitting up the Darnell Nurse and Cody Ceci pairing.

If the Oilers were hoping for immediate results, they got the exact opposite of that. Just 58 seconds in with the new look pairing of Nurse and Brett Kulak out on the ice, they were burned for a goal from Wyatt Johnston on an odd-man rush to open the scoring.

And then only four and a half minutes later, Esa Lindell threw the puck on net and it appeared to deflect off of the rear end of Nurse and in the net to make it 2-0 Stars just 5:29 into the game.

But Nurse had a chance to redeem himself a little bit later in the period. He carried the puck into the zone and dropped it off for Perry, who got a solid shot on the net and set the table for Ryan McLeod to pounce on the rebound and bury it. Now, it was a one-goal game again and the first period wasn’t even over yet.

And they didn’t even need the full period to get the job done. A shot from a rushing Connor McDavid rebounded off of Jake Oettinger‘s pad and landed right on the stick of Evan Bouchard, who buried it with ease to tie the game.

That wasn’t the end of the craziness in the first period either. McDavid thought he had another goal with the Oilers on the game’s first power play, but it wouldn’t go after being stopped by Oettinger’s discarded stick.

Midway through the second period, the Stars finally had their first power play of the game, and they had a chance to kill the Oilers momentum. It did anything but. Connor Brown and Mattias Janmark had a 2-on-1 on the penalty kill, and Brown set up the wide open Janmark to give the Oilers their first lead of the game.

And then just 51 seconds later, the Oilers top dogs were on the ice fresh out of the penalty kill, and Leon Draisaitl and Zach Hyman had a give-and-go on the rush, and Draisaitl beat Oettinger to give Edmonton a 4-2 lead.

And it just kept getting worse for the Stars. Chris Tanev, who left the game after blocking a shot when the game was still tied, did not return for the third period.

All of that combined seemed to take a lot of the life out of the Stars, as they couldn’t muster a lot of chances in the third period. Mattias Ekholm iced the game with an empty net goal from the other end of the ice, and the Oilers took the game by a score of 5-2 to tie the series. McDavid and Jamie Benn were the lone players in the game to get multiple points with two assists each.

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