I guess you could read that headline as some sort of condemnation of the Oilers' brass—that we're at Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final, an elimination game for Edmonton, and there's still so much uncertainty surrounding a key position. But I mean it in the most literal sense possible. Kris Knoblauch presumably knows by this point who it will be, but if anyone tells you they know who's the better option, they're lying. Nobody knows!
While the Panthers have made it to within a game of clinching their second straight Cup on the back of Sergei Bobrovsky and only Sergei Bobrovsky, the Oilers got through the past two months with a chaotic combo in net. They began with their primary starter, Stuart Skinner. The 26-year-old looked like the answer to their crease problem when he first slotted into the role a couple of years ago, but has only declined from there. Skinner almost handed the team an early exit, looking absolutely helpless in his first couple games against the Kings. He was replaced by the 33-year-old Pickard, a fringe NHLer whose only season as a starter saw him lead the league in losses for Colorado in 2017. Inexplicably, Pickard won four straight for the Oilers to get the series win, and even though a couple of those games were 7-4 and 6-4, Edmonton was in no position to complain.
The good luck continued through Game 1 against Vegas, and in Game 2 the Oilers survived a third-period comeback to win in overtime. But Pickard hurt his leg when Tomas Hertl collided with him in that contest, and even though he finished the night, he wasn't able to go back out for Game 3. The Oilers had to reunite with Skinner, and he allowed four goals in a loss.
Then, somehow, Stuart Skinner became Stuart Winner. He shut out Vegas twice in a row to clinch the series, flopped in Game 1 versus Dallas, then served as a wall through three dominant performances and one trickier victory to seal a Stanley Cup rematch. He was just good enough in the first meeting with the Panthers, then allowed the double-OT goal to Brad Marchand in Game 2. Game 3 was a massacre that saw Pickard return for mop-up duty, and after an ugly first period in Game 4 that the Oilers spent the rest of the night erasing, it was Pickard who took the job back and performed admirably with it, tying the series at two.
That's not all. In Game 5, while you can't exactly say Pickard screwed up any easy saves, he still allowed four goals on 18 shots as the Panthers cruised. Now, with their Stanley Cup dreams on the line, Knoblauch has to pick one or the another, Skinner or Pickard, to go back out there and start Game 6. On Monday, he was still noncommittal.
"Getting everybody’s input," he said. 'Whether it’s [general manager] Stan Bowman’s thoughts, [assistant coach Paul] Coffey or [goalie coach] Dustin Schwartz, [assistants] Glen Gulutzan, Mark Stuart, and our players. Knowing who they feel is going and who they feel confident at that time. And then there’s also the workload and numerous things we can think about."
That's a lot of words to say "I don't know." And frankly, how could he? Predicting goalie play kind of feels like the final frontier in the NHL's advanced-stats revolution. The margins between success and failure are so ridiculously thin that it ends up feeling random. Sometimes goalies are hot, and sometimes they're not. A guy like Knoblauch, who can read his charges' respective emotional states from up close, might have a slight advantage on the average fan. But not by much. To really make an informed decision, you'd need Dr. Strange on the bench alongside you.
Here's the deal with Skinner. He's been the team's Main Man more often than not. He's fallen flat on his face in memorable ways on a couple different occasions, and he's already been pulled multiple times in the Final. He's also bounced back when given the chance, and in the absolute most important games, he has come through. In the past two postseasons, his only loss in 10 outings from Games 5–7 was that 2-1 Game 7 gut punch to Florida that happened 51 weeks ago.
The case for Pickard is that you have more of a sense of what you're going to get. You can only point to a couple of playoff games that he's really commanded, but the lows haven't been as low as they've been with Skinner. That said, this man's never looked like a real NHL starter for any extended period of time, and he just lost Game 5.
It's really the same question that's haunted Edmonton all through the McDavid era: "Where we can we find a netminder who will keep the game tight for our superstar skaters?" Achingly close to a Cup they just barely missed last year, it's maybe a little cruel that this uncertainty still torments them. So who should it be, Stu or Picks? We'll only know the answer once it's too late to change it.
