PREVIEW: Oilers at Canucks
VANCOUVER, BC – A hard few weeks of Captain’s Skates, Training Camp and preseason for the Edmonton Oilers have all led to this.
The regular season is finally here.
The Oilers will begin their 82-game regular-season schedule on Wednesday night with the first game of a home-and-away series with the Vancouver Canucks at Rogers Arena to open the 2023-24 NHL campaign.
"There's a lot of expectations on the group with the majority of our roster coming back, where we are as a team and where we want to be," Zach Hyman said. "But I think it starts tomorrow and we're excited after a long camp to get after it."
For the Blue & Orange, their attention over the last month has been firmly set on building momentum in the first handful of games using a day-to-day approach that’s been fostered since the players arrived in Oil Country almost two weeks in advance of Training Camp, where they began skating with one another and working towards improving on a day-to-day basis, improving defensively and creating the right environment for their group to have a quick start to their season.
“We've never come into this room between periods being like, ‘We’ve got to turn more pucks over and score more goals and try more behind-the-back passes’,” captain Connor McDavid said. “We've never done that. It's never been about offence. This room is always talking about ways to slow the other team down. That's always the talk in here.”
During the ‘21-22 and ‘22-23 campaigns, the Oilers began their respective seasons in October with 9-1 and 7-3 starts that benefitted their Stanley Cup bids later in the campaign during dry spells that popped up at different points of the year – whether that was in November or February, March or April.
“I think last year through 20 games we were 10-10, so we'd like to have a better start,” McDavid added. “I don't think we're four games or three games above .500 until maybe the new year, so we'd like to get off to a good first half of the year.
“We know coming down the stretch we can play some great hockey, but what happens in October and November shows up in May and June. I think we want to play the brand of hockey that's going to be successful throughout the course of a season and the postseason.
