Oilers lose, but get their licks in in playoff preview with LA Kings

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Well, the suspicions are confirmed — if you take Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman, Mattias Ekholm, Jake Walman, Trent Frederic and Evander Kane out of Edmonton’s lineup, they aren’t going to beat the Los Angeles Kings.

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The experiment played out just the way everyone thought it would Monday night when the Oilers, minus $41.5 million in salary, playing the second of back-to-back games and icing what looked like a training camp road game roster, fell 5-0 to the visiting Kings.

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Shocker.

While it was still mathematically possible for the Oilers to stay in the race for second place, they basically surrendered home-ice advantage to the Kings, electing to play it safe and not expose any more top players to injury than they have to.

Smart play, considering they can’t go more than one game without one of their key players limping into the trainer’s room.

Monday’s result means virtually nothing, but it is also interesting to note that Edmonton has one goal in its last three games with the Kings.

For as lopsided as the game was (Edmonton had four even-strength shots through 30 minutes) it was still kind of compelling in its own right, with both teams using this as an opportunity to send a message heading into their fourth-consecutive first-round series.

It ran the gamut from chippy to nasty, with Oilers defenceman Darnell Nurse being ejected from the game in the second period for crosschecking Quinton Byfield on the back of the head while he was face down on the ice.

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The physicality didn’t go over well with the Kings.

“They have their B squad and they’re trying to hurt us,” Los Angeles forward Phillip Danault said in a between-periods TV interview.

Byfield left the game and didn’t return for the third period. This one might register on the suspension scale, but with the clown show at NHL Player Safety, you have no idea what warrants supplemental discipline and what doesn’t.

For everyone who was injured, it’s too bad that referees Wes McCauley and Jean Hebert weren’t two of them. They must have known this game was on Amazon Prime and wanted to get as much air time as possible, or they were terrified to see a couple of teams going at each other hard, because they called everything that moved — eight minors in the first period and nine more (and a pair of 10-minute misconducts) in the second.

Then, same referees, same two teams, didn’t call a single penalty in the third period.

LATE HITS — Edmonton’s lineup consisted of 11 forwards, one of which was freshly-signed winger Quinn Hutson in his NHL debut, and six defencemen, including a bottom pairing of Josh Brown and Cam Dineen… Kings goalie Darcy Kuemper had a shutout going with 12 minutes to play but they pulled him out of the game and inserted David Rittich.

E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com

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