PREVIEW: Oilers vs. Stars

The Edmonton Oilers return to home ice on Tuesday to host the Dallas Stars at Rogers Place.

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PREVIEW: Oilers vs. Stars

EDMONTON, AB – It feels good to be back in Oil Country.

After finishing their season-high seven-game road trip on Saturday with a 6-3 victory over the Florida Panthers in a rematch of the last two Stanley Cup Finals, the Edmonton Oilers return to home ice on Tuesday at Rogers Place to play host to the Dallas Stars in a one-off homestand.

“It’s been a long stretch,” Oilers captain Connor McDavid said. “We've played a lot of hockey in a short period of time across a number of different cities, so it was a tough stretch. It’s nice to be home and spend a little time here to regroup for only one, but it's a big game playing Dallas, and we’ve gotta find a way to get a win here at home.”

The Oilers will host the Stars this week before having three days to practice ahead of a trip to the West Coast for a Pacific Division duel with the Seattle Kraken at Climate Pledge Arena on Saturday, followed by a five-game homestand to begin their December schedule.

The intense travel demands of their previous road trip meant they had no practices outside of the pre-game skates, so there’s comfort for the group in knowing they’ll have a few days to make adjustments and build on the positives that came at the end of the road trip.

Additionally, the returns of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Kasperi Kapanen appear to be on the horizon, so there's an extra boost being added to the locker room from some teammates getting closer to being back in the lineup.

“We were on the road for two weeks and we didn't have one practice,” McDavid said. “As I said, it was a tough stretch, so we got to take advantage of this practice time. We gotta take advantage of the rest time a little bit, too, to recharge the batteries."

Edmonton closed out a 3-3-1 road trip by putting in its best two efforts at the tail end of the trip, having been unlucky to only get a point in Tampa with a 2-1 overtime loss on Thursday before locking up 12 days on the road with Saturday’s solid performance in Sunrise.

At the beginning of the season, Head Coach Kris Knoblauch knew it was going to be a gruelling grind on the road at this stage of the season, having looked at their previous trip on the calendar and thought about how difficult it was going to be for them to manage the travel and find results against tough teams.

Seven points out of a possible 14 points might be less than they'd hoped for, but it's a satisfactory result considering the circumstances, and the bench boss believes his group is in a good position to move forward from some early struggles this season and build off their two performances in the state of Florida.

"As hard as that trip was to come out .500, we're happy about it," he said. "The way we lost some of those games, it could have been better. We're a little disappointed with those. But when I looked at the schedule at the beginning of the season and looked at how difficult it was going to be with all the road games and travel that we have starting the season, I knew we'd be in this situation or close to it anyway."

"I'd like a couple more wins, but it is what it is, and now we have to start gaining some traction, playing better hockey and winning more games."

The Oilers looked like a much more connected group defensively across their loss to the Lightning and victory over the Panthers – shutting the door in Tampa for 57 minutes of regulation before losing a heartbreaker in overtime and following it up in Florida to claim the win in an emotionally-charged atmosphere.

After going to the Stanley Cup Final two seasons in a row and playing 22 games this season with middling results, the Oilers recognized a few games ago that the same approach wasn't working and needed to make a change, which showed positively in their last two games to greater effect.

That process continued on Monday with their first full-team practice in nearly two weeks, with three more this week to help them adjust.

“Now that we're 20-plus games in the season, we're starting to alter some things, and today we adjusted one thing, but it's hard just because we've had so much success," Knoblauch said. "We've gone to the Stanley Cup Final twice. We didn't want to change anything, but now that we're playing as we have for as long as we have, we have to start thinking that things aren't just going to work themselves out.

"We need to make some adjustments. Whether that's moving guys around our system, so now we're starting to look at those."

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins knows from having been there in back-to-back years that it's not just a guarantee they can get back to a third straight Final, and it's going to take them making the necessary adjustments, like in the last two games of their road trip, for them to do it again.

"We don't think it's just gonna happen," he said. We definitely don't think that just because we've done it in the past that it will just automatically happen. We understand that it takes a lot of work, and we know we have the ability to do it, but it's gonna start with work and buying into doing the right things on a nightly basis.

"By no means do we sit in here and think, 'Don't worry, it's gonna come'. We understand that we have to make that happen, so we have to make that switch. And from what I saw on that trip, I thought there were a lot of good things, and we'll build off that."