'HARD-FOUGHT GAME'
Flames ready for heckuva tilt with Oilers tonight
Round 2 of the Battle of Alberta goes tonight at Rogers Place in Edmonton, and if the first meeting back on Oct. 16 was any indication, we're in for a dandy up north on the QEII.
"It's going to be a hard-fought game," Mikael Backlund said following the morning skate. "The Battle of Alberta is always special, always makes it extra exciting. We've got to be ready. We know they're going to come out hard like they did against Florida. We know they want to end their streak. But we've got to come out and answer it and show them that we're the better team.
"It's important for us to establish our game early, get pucks in and get to their net."
The Flames are looking to build on one of their best efforts of the season, a 5-1 win over the league-leading Florida Panthers on Tuesday. The Oilers, meanwhile, are in a plunge - dropping a 6-0 score to those very same Cats only 48 hours ago, and enter tonight's game having lost 13 of their last 15 overall.
But sometimes, a wounded animal can be the most dangerous.
The Oilers, likely, aren't as bad as recent history tells us. They currently own the NHL's worst record in the past eight weeks, but did show promise in the front half of the campaign, leaping out to a 16-and-5 start that put them atop the league standings by Dec. 1.
So, which of the two teams are they? The best, or the worst?
Or, possibly, somewhere in between?
The truth is, it doesn't really matter. In the Battle of Alberta, you toss records out the window and let the players write their own version.
And no matter how the two teams are trending, the players get up for these games like no other on the docket.
"You've got to make it hard on them," Noah Hanifin said of defending Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. "It's tough, they're obviously great players, but you can't give them any free chances. They're great players and they're probably going to get their looks every now and then, but it's about limiting those, trying to frustrate them a bit and give them nothing easy."
Goaltending has been a real sore spot for the Oilers this year, and with former Flame Mike Smith on the shelf, as well as upstart farmhand Stuart Skinner only now exiting COVID protocol, the club will turn back to Mikko Koskinen between the pipes.
Koskinen is on a personal seven-game skid, with a woeful .855 save percentage and a bloated, 4.28 goals-against average to show for it.
The Flames, though, aren't concerning themselves with that, nor the 'drama' circulating on talk radio in this province. They, too, are looking to get their game in order, and know that one game - while impressive - won't define this critical stretch of the calendar.
They need to use Tuesday's victory for what it was - a stepping-stone.
"We were going through a bit of a slump recently, too, and we won one game, but we've still got some work to do ourselves," Hanifin said. "In our locker-room, we've really been focused on that, kind of building our game back and finding our game. I think we have to be a desperate team tonight, as well. We're in a situation where we have to win this game. It's a huge game for us and that's what the guys in the room are focused on."
With three of the next four games coming away from the Scotiabank Saddledome, it's critical to bank some points before getting a more favourable, home-heavy schedule the rest of the way.
To do that, the Flames know they'll have to play a disciplined game, which wasn't the case when these two teams last met. While the Oilers' powerplay has cooled off a bit - and with McDavid and Draisaitl steering the ship up front - they're still one of the NHL's top teams in that category, operating at a 29.4% clip.
"That's probably the biggest thing for us," Hanifin said. "You've got to stay out of the box against these guys. If you get dragged into some of the emotion, the nonsense and take dumb penalties, that's going to bite us in the long run.
"It's important to play with emotion and play hard for each other, but it's important to play a disciplined game and do nothing that's going to cost us."
