BLOG: Oilers putting Cup Final heartbreak behind them as new season begins

EDMONTON, AB – When the ‘2023-24 Western Conference Champions’ banner gets raised to the rafters at Rogers Place on Wednesday night, expect the focus of the Oilers to be firmly locked onto what's ahead of them rather than what's behind.

Last season was a banner year for the Blue & Orange, but the one that will go up next to the 2005-06 banner that ended in similar heartbreak in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final isn’t the one they’d hoped to be celebrating on Opening Night of their 2024-25 regular season.

It was an incredible season in Oil Country, but what’s in the past is in the past as a new season officially arrives tonight with a visit from the Winnipeg Jets.

“I think it's obviously an accomplishment that we went through together and we just came short of the ultimate goal,” Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said. “But tonight, we'll be focused on the game at hand."

“That’s in the past now, so we're excited to get this season rolling. It's always a new season when you start game one, so we're just excited to get it going."

"Once you get one or two in, you get into a rhythm.”

The Oilers begin a new campaign on Wednesday focused on forgetting about last year’s emotional run to the Stanley Cup Final, putting all their energy and attention into getting off to a good start to the new 82-game regular season tonight to put themselves on the best track possible to return to the playoffs.

For the players who experienced last year's heartbreak, the feeling will never truly leave, but being able to park those emotions and get going on another regular season after a short summer and long Training Camp goes a long way in helping the group wipe the slate clean and get back to having a solid start.

"That's a difficult question because it's important to detach from last year," winger Connor Brown said. "Obviously, when there are highs and lows like that in a season, they can linger with you, so it's important for us just to detach and get back to the moment and to get back to the process of playing one game at a time here. It starts with a good shift and building our group's identity."

Over Training Camp and eight pre-season games, the Oilers worked to get some of their off-season arrivals up to speed with new systems and teammates while understanding that each player on the roster will have a role to play—whether that's primarily as a goalscorer, a shutdown option, a face-off winner, or a penalty-killer.

Having each player satisfy those roles on Opening Night against the Jets will be a significant reward from the hard competition over Camp, and preparation on an individual level is one of the only significant boxes left for them to check before the puck drops on a new season at 8:00 pm MT on Wednesday.

"I think it comes down to individually just making sure you're prepared," Nugent-Hopkins said. "We go over everything systems-wise, and we've been getting some good skates here, especially in the last three days. We just got our team together, and everybody's been working hard on things that we need to do.

"So individually tonight, everybody needs to make sure that we're prepared, and I know we have the group that guys will be ready."

As the team that scored the fourth-most goals in the NHL last season (294), their collective approach during the McDavid-Draisaitl era has always been about minimizing goals against, which improved by a 23-goal margin from '22-23 to finish with the 10th-fewest allowed in the League (247) in '23-24.

This year will be no different with the team's determination to play as a five-person unit when defending while letting the offence come to them naturally.

"That's been our mindset for the past few years. That's why we've had some success," Nugent-Hopkins said. "It's defence first, and then offence kind of leads from there – not just defending in our zone. It's the way that we backtrack and forecheck and get pucks back and work away from the puck. That kind of dictates all that stuff, but for sure, our mindset is to be good defensively and see what happens from there."