It is, I insist, cool and good that one of the wildest and most intense playoff games in a while ended so stupidly. It rules, quite frankly, that a game which saw the Kings seemingly exorcise their Oiler-matchup demons, then collapse in the face of a sudden Edmonton onslaught, was ultimately decided by a blooper-reel goal. Hockey is a ludicrous sport sometimes, and puck often lies, and had Phillip Danault taken a normal shot, Stuart Skinner probably would have stopped it easily and Game 1 would've headed to overtime, the Oilers carrying all the momentum after erasing a four-goal deficit. But Danault fanned, and fluttered the puck with comical slowness past Skinner, who saw neither hide nor hair of it.
"I got all of it," Danault deadpanned of his half-whiff that gave Los Angeles the 6-5 victory. And why not joke? The Kings were bailed out by the vagaries of physics, squeaking by barely a period removed from winning a laugher. These Oilers have been the Kings' bane, eliminating them in the first round in each of the last three seasons. But this is a better Kings team, and a worse Oilers one, and when L.A. scored a pair of goals in the first and a pair in the second to go up 4-0, maybe they thought they could exhale. Who'd have blamed them?
But Leon Draisaitl got the Oilers on the board just before the second intermission, and Mattias Janmark halved the lead two minutes into the third. Kevin Fiala then scored what looked like an insurance goal for L.A. to make it 5-2, but this one wasn't done by a long shot. Goals from Corey Perry, Zach Hyman, and Connor McDavid—the latter two coming 36 seconds apart with the Oil net empty—made it, improbably, a tie game.
McDavid's goal with 1:28 left, coming after a trio of assists, was a particularly nifty bit of stickwork. Mikey Anderson will be seeing this one in his nightmares:
But Danault's winner turned what looked like a reverse Miracle on Manchester in the making into a microcosm of last year's Cup Final, in which the Oilers couldn't quite complete the huge comeback. For the Kings, relief can be as powerful an emotion as triumph. "I’m so happy we won that game," Drew Doughty said, "because that would have been a shitty game to lose.”
So what, exactly, should we take from this game, if anything? Both teams had extended periods when they dominated play, and both teams melted down defensively. Both teams had successes they'd like to replicate and entire periods they'd like to forget. Quite probably the game means nothing; the Oilers did win the next game after the Miracle on Manchester. It's all kind of screwy already: If you had asked anyone beforehand, in this matchup of a defensively oriented Kings team and the Oilers' arsenal, who'd take the result in a game featuring 11 goals, few would've picked L.A. But maybe that's the takeaway after all: These Oilers have the ability to impose their identity on any game and any opponent, and that identity is "very silly hockey." I look forward to more of it.
