Pundits warn fourteen straight Oilers wins don't guarantee a Stanley Cup

The Edmonton Oilers have won 14 straight games, an all-time best for Canadian teams, but pundits say it won’t mean much unless the team wins the Stanley Cup.The rare accomplishment was made in a 4-1 win January 23 against Columbus. The win lifted the Oilers to a record of 27-15-1, a far cry from the 3-9-1 record the team had on November 12 2023. That was the day general manager Ken Holland fired head coach Jay Woodcroft and defensive coach Dave Manson. Ironically, Woodcroft left with the highest all-time win percentage of any coach in the team’s storied history at .643. However, the team has won 80% of their games since November 12 when Chris Knoblauch became head coach and Paul Coffey was made the defensive coach.Rod Pedersen, whose eponymous sports talk show is carried online and on Game TV, says the Oilers' GM has been vindicated. “I thought that they pulled the trigger a little quickly on Jay Woodcroft, but Ken Holland has won Stanley Cups before. I'd like to defer that he knows what he's doing. And that includes the Evander Kane signing, now the Corey Perry signing, the changing coaches decision. It looks like a marvelous, marvelous job of management by Ken Holland so far,” Pedersen told the Western Standard.The Oilers have had ten coaches in the past 15 years and five since Connor McDavid joined the team in 2015. Albertan fans are demanding, Pedersen said.“Talking to people in Edmonton, Jay (Woodcroft) might have succumbed to the pressure of coaching in that market. It's a tough place and just look down the Highway Number Two (to Calgary), they’re rotating coaches pretty regularly as well with middling results,” Pedersen said.“You look at Las Vegas, they fired coaches too until they found the guy that got the job done for them. And nobody really even argued it. Kelly McCrimmon, we know from the Brandon days with the Wheat Kings, he knows how to win. And he just kept firing coaches until he got the right one.”Pedersen believes Coffey has made the "biggest difference" with his coaching and his presence on the bench and in the locker room."They're not giving as many scoring opportunities," Pedersen said."McDavid and Draisaityl have turned on the taps and just playing with them is going to create opportunities for whoever's playing with them. They used to say a fire hydrant could score 50 goals playing with Wayne Gretzky. That's not to say this is a bunch of fire hydrants, but, I think they've opened up their play."Moshe Lander, an Albertan and a sports professor at Concordia University in Montreal, says the Oilers have so much talent, their initial slump was more surprising than their streak. He said when the Oilers stopped having to play catch-up, they started to become victors.“Sometimes it's something just as simple as that the bounces go your way. Sometimes it's a matter of just scoring first,” Lander told the Western Standard.“If you can get out in front, then the opposition has to come to you. And all of a sudden, you can maybe either continue to be aggressive or you can sit back and try and defend the lead, but you have the luxury of being able to (choose)."Lander, a self-declared Flames fan, doesn't think the Oilers are the biggest example of "Canadian exceptionalism" this season.“If I'm looking for history right now, I'm looking a little bit down the highway at Winnipeg. What they're doing right now in terms of leading the league at more than the halfway point, is maybe the more impressive feat,” Lander said.One consistency during the streak has been goalie Stuart Skinner, who won his 11th straight game in the tilt against Columbus, one better than Grant Fuhr did in 1985-86. Pedersen said Skinner always showed promise, given his past role in a Western Hockey League champion in Swift Current. And, unlike the 1980's, these Oilers are playing good defense in front of their goalie.“I talked to Grant about his lofty goals against average. If you look it up, I think it's the highest goals against average of any goalie in the hall of fame. And asked him about that and he just laughed and shrugged his shoulders and said ‘I won five Stanley Cups. I don't care about records. I don't care about stats.’”The Montreal Canadiens had the old record for Canadian teams, having won 12 straight games in the 1967/68 season on the way to becoming Stanley Cup Champions. However, American teams have won 13 or more straight games five times,14 games twice, and 15 games twice.The all-time record of 17 games was set by the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1993. Captain Mario Lemieux entered the playoffs with a bad back and the New York Islanders knocked them out in overtime of Game 7 of the Patrick Division Finals. In 2016-17, the Columbus Blue Jackets won 16 straight games, but lost four games to one in round one of the playoffs against Pittsburgh.Lander, who ended his interview with, “Go Flames go,” said that, records aside, long regular season winning streaks come and go.“We see that every year and we see it from any number of unusual places, whether it's down in Florida or in California. Remember, at the beginning of the year, the Kings had an incredible winning streak,” Lander commented.“Even though Edmonton likes to tout itself as the City of Champions, it's been well over 30 years since they've had anything to parade as far as the NHL goes. You need to carry this momentum into the playoffs and show that you can do it there. It's impressive what you can do in the regular season, but it means nothing.”Last year, Boston had the best regular season in NHL history, only to lose to Florida in the playoffs. Pedersen said the Oilers’ current streak will be just a footnote in history if the team doesn't have playoff success.“Here in Florida, where I'm living now, the Panthers' nine-game winning streak snapped last weekend courtesy of New Jersey. Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky told the reporters afterwards, this is a good thing and the streaks don't matter now, it's the playoffs that matter,” Pedersen recalled.“The fans and the media left the rink scratching their heads. They couldn't figure out what he was talking about. I got it. There's something to be said about peaking too soon. I'm not saying that's what the Oilers are going to do. You want to be playing your best, but nobody's going to remember this winning streak in the spring if this team doesn't go to the Stanley Cup. That you can bring to the bank.”