If you are a squeamish person, I hope you only heard about Kane’s slit wrist during Tuesday night’s Oilers game and didn’t watch it. I hope you didn’t go on YouTube and look up the incident after missing the game. I had to for the sake of this article, and I’m not the biggest fan of bloody sights either. Kane got taken down on the ice, and Patrick Maroon’s skate made contact with his wrist. It was an accident, of course. No one would ever intend to do that, and you could notice the concern on Maroon’s face after it happened. Kane kept shouting “HELP” as he was rushing to the bench, and you could spot the blood on the ice where he fell. It was announced during the broadcast that he made it to the hospital and was stable. He will miss 3-4 months with this injury and be put on LTIR.
In my article leading up to this week, I mentioned that the Oilers need to get more secondary scoring from players who aren’t, or don’t play regularly, in their top six. Kane averaged a point in every game with 13, leading up to the Tampa Bay game. After 29 and 26 points from McDavid and Draisaitl, respectively, there are 16 points each from Nugent-Hopkins and Hyman. Nurse and Barrie both have nine points, which is pretty good for defensemen. But the next highest point total by an Oilers forward is only four.
There is more to hockey than just point totals, and you don’t expect the bottom six forwards to be point-per-game players, but it’s easy for non-Oilers fans to give Edmonton the one/two man team narrative. Foegele, Puljujarvi, and Yamamoto were three examples of players that I said needed to get their stats trending upwards. Foegele opened the scoring on Tuesday night with a shorthanded goal, and the relief he expressed said it all. That could be enough to boost his confidence because he needed that one. Puljujarvi gets excellent scoring chances but can never capitalize. Yamamoto still has yet to score even one goal. Since returning from injury, Dylan Holloway has been a bottom-six forward for the last few games.
Give Holloway more chances in a second-line spot with Kane gone. Accept that he will make mistakes just like any rookie as long as he can make up for it with the modest offense. No one expects him to be Connor or Leon so there is no pressure, at least not as much.
This also opens the door for Mattias Janmark, who signed with Edmonton this past summer as a depth forward and has yet to play a game for them this year. And we may also get our first look at Klim Kostin, who they got for trading Dmitri Samorukov. The four-game road trip ends tonight and Saturday afternoon with two tough opponents. Let’s see how the offense responds to a significant loss on the roster.
