For those of you who don’t care about hockey, you can probably just go ahead and ignore this post. New illustrations soon, though, so stay tuned.

I’ve watched the Edmonton Oilers get shit-kicked on more occasions than I’d like this season, but tonight it was a pleasant surprise to see things go the other way. The Oilers rolled into Colorado and barnstormed the Avalanche in an 8-1 demolition.

Sam Gagner and Robert Nilsson have been teamed up with new Oiler Ales Kotalik (acquired from Buffalo at the trade deadline) lately, and tonight they really clicked as a unit. Kotalik potted his first goal as an Oiler (technically his second, after his shootout winner against the Blues, but this is the first one that actually counted in his stats). He also proceeded to record three assists, as did Robert Nilsson, who played set-up man all night. Sam Gagner was the big story, though. After the hockey media spent most of the season all over him for being bitten by the dreaded “sophomore jinx”, Gagner has been on a tear lately and notched his first-ever career hat-trick, as well as setting up Kotalik’s goal. Incidentally, Gagner also tied his goal total from last season. Combined, these three managed to snag 11 points on the night as well as all three game stars (Gagner the 1st, followed by Kotalik and Nilsson).

If the Avs didn’t notice it before-hand, I’m sure they realized that they were very screwed when Jason Strudwick and Ladislav Smid were tapped to blue-line the power play near the end of the game. When the other team puts their lowest-scoring defencement out against you, you know you’re in bad shape.

The whole point of this thing was… uh… well mostly I’m just excited that the Oilers won a game in regulation for the first time in a couple of weeks. And I haven’t written anything in the blog for a while, hence you all get to read or completely ignore this.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 9:11 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.