If you were boxscore-watching Thursday night’s game between the Edmonton Oilers and Vancouver Canucks, you wouldn’t be able to tell that Alberta’s team was short four members of their top-six.

In fact, you wouldn’t think they were missing any players, because on a night when the Oilers score nine goals, one would think Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman would be a part of the mix. That wasn’t the case.

Just don’t look at the goals against. A seven-spot against is tough to look at.

The issues at hand are all too common for the Oilers. Just days ago, we heard head coach Mike Babcock talk about the “ridiculious” season-opening performance, indicating the team had “serious work to do.”

Consider some of it done.

“I thought tonight, to tell you the truth, I thought we really started well,” he said. “I thought we played the game hard and did really good things, and then we stopped doing good things.”

And that’s the kicker. Early in the game, it was all Edmonton and often. 4-0 after the first frame on goals from Vasily Podkolzin, Owen Michaels (his first in the NHL), Evan Bouchard and Ryan Shea. It took all of 27 seconds for Leon Draisaitl to make it 5-0 in the second period, and while the Canucks got a couple within a frantic first six minutes, the Oilers would respond as Connor McDavid and Kasperi Kapanen scored shorthanded goals all of 34 seconds apart.

Vancouver, however, would score with less than a second left to end the period, and that bled into the third period. Marco Rossi scored twice, and Elias Pettersson added another in the first seven minutes and 37 seconds, and an 8-2 lead was suddenly 8-6.

“We turned some pucks over and we drifted in D-zone coverage with our low guy, our low forward, and in the end it just ended up in the net,” said Babcock, identifying what plagued the Oilers on many goals against.

Devon Levi, making his Oilers debut, was hung out to dry more often than not, and even found himself in the Guide and Record Book as the seven goals he gave up were the most in franchise history in a road victory. Not much he could do on some, but seven goals against on 3.58 expected Canucks goals, according to Natural Stat Trick, doesn’t look good.

“We can clean up a little bit around our net, I thought the puck was bouncing around in there,” said Oilers captain Connor McDavid, who finished the night with his shorthanded goal and five points. “I thought it was positive, though, for 30, 40 minutes. It was what the game should look like for us, what it could look like for us.”

There are positives to take away, no doubt. 10 Oilers got on the scoresheet, five of which with multi-point efforts, all the while the team misses a good chunk of their forward group. But the negatives can arguably outweigh them.

The goaltending was subpar, at best, and the third pairing of Jake Walman and Shakir Mukhamadullin was nothing short of a disaster. Those two alone made mistakes that directly led to four of the goals against. Does one, or both, sit in favour of Spencer Stastney or Ty Emberson?

We’ll see Saturday when they hit the ice hosting the Seattle Kraken.

Nonetheless, there’s lots of work to be done.

“We’ll look at the whole (game) on the flight here and then we’ll get ready to have practice tomorrow and get ready for our next (game),” said Babcock. “But we know we can be way better.

“What I saw tonight was a group that could play right and knew what they were doing, and then I saw a group that didn’t do it. The main thing is if you know you can do it now, you got to find a way to just repeat, repeat, rinse, repeat, do it again.”

Growing pains will be part of this team’s journey. There’s lots of new faces, not just on the ice, but on the bench, too, and one has to wonder how much of an impact shortening the pre-season from eight games to four has had.

It goes without saying that training camp was condensed this year, lasting around 13 days between when things kicked off and the final pre-season game. That’s down from 13 in 2025, and 15 days in both 2024 and 2023. That’s a few fewer days of practice, and a few fewer games for the big club to gel.

Pour on the injury issues the Oilers are dealing with early this season, and all of a sudden you have a disjointed team.

Two down, 82 to go.

Zach Laing is the managing editor at Daily Faceoff Edmonton and news director at The Nation Network. He can be followed on X at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach.laing@bettercollective.com.

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