The Edmonton Oilers' maddening, decade-long goalie controversy is over ... for the next week, anyway. As that next week contains the entirety of what is now a best-of-three Stanley Cup Final, it feels like a mercy. Calvin Pickard, after two periods and most of an overtime of effective relief in Thursday's absurd 5–4 win, will be the man between the pipes, as there is simply not enough time left to survive any sort of disaster that might tempt head coach Kris Knoblauch to go back to Stuart Skinner.
This is not necessarily the ideal situation. (Say what you will about Sergei Bobrovsky and his contract and his very good but not elite play—there's something to be said for just not having to ever worry about the position.) It's certainly not a normal one for a team two wins from a Cup, to be still figuring out its best netminder. But nothing these Oilers do is normal. They became just the seventh team in NHL history, and the first since 2006, to come back from three goals down to win a Cup Final game. They became the first team ever to do it after digging that three-goal deficit in the first period. They couldn't have squirmed (clawing is for Panthers) back into it without Pickard. They might not have made it out of the first damn round.
Pickard is now 7-0 in these playoffs, which is a strange record to have for a guy who started Game 4 on the bench. But after taking over from Bad Skinner after two games in the first round, reeling off six straight, then suffering a lower-body injury, Pickard had to cede the gig. This time it was Good Skinner, right up until it came time to deal with Florida. Game 4's starter was a big secret until a few hours before puck drop, and it was Skinner, and he was Bad Skinner. The Panthers scored thrice on 17 shots, which is, in fairness, a lot of shots to face in 20 minutes, but still not enough stopped. Pickard was in net for the second, and he was tested almost immediately.
"We're down 3-0. He's coming in. He's cold. It's not easy," said Leon Draisaitl. It's not! But for my money, there was no save bigger than Pickard smothering Anton Lundell's sudden breakaway, just the third shot he faced. No time to think about this one. Just the years of reps and the level head and reflexes required to instantly snap into ready mode. "Huge save at a huge time," Ryan Nugent-Hopkins observed, and coming past the halfway point of regulation in what was a 3–1 game, the Oilers' comeback could easily have been smothered in the crib then and there.
Just as crucial, if a little stranger and luckier and less artful, was Pickard's glove-tip save of a Sam Bennett one-timer seven minutes into overtime. He got just enough of the puck to deflect it into and off the crossbar, and when people call the sport a game of inches, this is what they mean.
"I read it pretty well," Pickard said. "I looked in my glove and it wasn't in there. I heard the crowd 'ooh' and 'ahh' and I got a good bounce."
After Draisaitl won it for Edmonton in overtime, that glove and that bounce are the difference between a tied series and the Stanley Cup being in the building on Saturday. The Oilers' backs aren't against the wall, only because they had Pickard behind them.
Pickard is an unlikely guy to emerge as the most pivotal player in this Final. He's not some untested kid, and yet not a veteran with a ton of miles on him either. "Career backup" is an overly generous way to describe him. He's on his sixth team, and from 2017 to 2023 started just 16 total games in the NHL. The Oilers signed him off the scrap heap, and then dumped him on their own scrap heap: He spent the entire 2022–23 season in the AHL, and was only called up the next season because Jack Campbell (one in a long list of guys Edmonton believed could be The Guy, and were wrong about) was headed down. Imagine being 30 years old, having washed out with five organizations already, and toiling in Bakersfield for an entire year. Maybe Pickard's most unlikely save was of his own career, by not hanging 'em up.
He played well as Skinner's backup upon his call-up, and ended up outplaying him in the spring, earning himself a role as the 1B this year. But it was Skinner's job to lose, which he now has done for the second time this postseason. It's been a long and winding road, but the net is Pickard's, Cup or bust.
On Thursday, Pickard became the sixth goaltender to win a Final game in relief, a club whose exclusivity is self-explanatory: Usually if things are bad enough to have to go to the backup, they're bad enough that you don't come back. But these Oilers have a knack for comebacks—their fans' blood pressure levels might call it a curse—and their never-say-die skaters require just some basic steadiness in their backstop to do their thing. Pickard's 22 saves offered that last night, and the hope of more of it in the last two or three games of the season. That's still not the way to bet; I'm not sure anything can ever come easy for this team.
