Sharks’ Thornton, Couture game-time decision

Playing their first postseason game in 11 years, the Edmonton Oilers rolled out to a two-goal, first period lead.

The Oilers host the San Jose Shark at Rogers Place on Wednesday in Game 1 of the opening round series, marking the first Oilers playoff game since the spring of 2006. We saw the same out of Milan Lucic previous year in the first round against L.A. That stuff, you know what, you’ve got to play through that stuff. “It gets you in the game, gets your team in the game”. It was a half-breakaway. The teams each had 10 shots in the first period, but San Jose outshot Edmonton 28-7 through the next 40 minutes heading into overtime. They have the Oilers on their heels and will look to take a commanding lead on Friday at Rogers Place.

Joel Ward and Paul Martin scored for San Jose. Couture, who was the leading scorer of last season’s playoffs, will center Joe Pavelski and Melker Karlsson on San Jose’s first line Wednesday evening. Despite the Sharks edge in that category, the Oilers finished the season with the 5th best powerplay (22.9%), while the Sharks powerplay struggled tremendously finishing the regular season with the 5th worst powerplay (16.7%). They were forcing pucks to one another and seemed disjointed off the rush.

The Oilers took six penalties compared with three for the Sharks.

“We got what we probably deserved out there”. “You lose momentum by doing that”, said Eberle. The guys who kill are wasting a lot of energy and the guys who don’t are sitting on the bench. San Jose got good news with the return of Logan Couture to the line-up, while veteran Joe Thornton Saturday. Plus the Sharks are coming off a Stanley Cup appearance, the Sharks have not won a cup in their franchise history, with coming so close but falling short, that feeling of emptiness must still be resonating in the player’s heads. The Oilers were red hot, winning 12 of their last 14, while San Jose had dropped nine of 13.

San Jose’s roster has combined for 1,169 games in the Stanley Cup playoffs compared to 342 for Edmonton (most of those by Milan Lucic). “We forechecked them hard and they got caught on some long shifts”. “We know their game pretty well, and they know ours pretty well”. The Oilers ended up losing 3-2 in overtime but Gretzky says he’s happy to see playoff hockey back in Edmonton.

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Key forwards such as Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Jordan Eberle, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and defensemen Oscar Klefbom and Darnell Nurse will play their first National Hockey League playoff game on Wednesday. The Sharks are averaging 2.7 goals per game and are scoring on 16.7 percent of their power play opportunities.

Letestu promptly passed it to a streaking Kassian, who barreled in alone and fired a wrist shot low past the blocker of goalie Martin Jones. He shot again, this time through Jones’ pads. They’ve built up a tremendous amount of character and resilience during that run and put it to use in dominating the second and third periods.

If both Thornton and Couture are not available for the opener, expect the depth players on San Jose to step up. In addition, the Oilers have Cam Talbot. “They didn’t look anything like the team that we’ve seen in the last two months tonight, but they looked like the team that went to the Stanley Cup Final a year ago”.

“I just think the safety issues are going to be huge as the drinking goes on”.