Game 34 PREVIEW: vs. Edmonton! (again!)

The Need to Knows

The Time: 7pm PT

The Place: Climate Pledge Arena in Beautiful Seattle, Washington

Place to Watch: ESPN+, Hulu, SportsNet West, TVAS (if you can speak French, anyway)

Place to Listen: KJR 93.3

The exhausted, bleary-eyed opposing viewpoint: Copper and Blue

Know Your Enemy

• Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl together have the same amount of points together as the next four Oilers; 124. They are living breathing mutants and should be studied by science.
• Outside of the two headed monster, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is having a pretty solid year; particularly on the power play, being third on their power play points with 22
• Stuart Skinner is apparently one hundred percent the starter for the Oil, as his .916 SV% is leaps and bounds better than Jack Campbell’s, which is a shame, because Campbell makes a hell of a lot more money.

Game Preview

The Kraken are now in the very funny position of being in the wildcard with nearly identical points and a slight lead on goal differential. Because the Flames don’t play tonight, both sides are effectively playing for 3rd place in the Pacific! The Oilers have been getting themselves into a real groove lately, though there have been a few stinkers (Anaheim and Nashville on the same week?) in their otherwise much improved performance.

The Kraken meanwhile, are struggling mightily right now; mostly struggling to keep leads or come back like they’ve been able to earlier in the year. They can still absolutely do all of that, but they need to dig deep in order to face this Edmonton squad trying their darnedest to prove they are not in fact a complete shambles; they still have the best player in the world and the best German player ever to deal with. It’s going to be a tall order.

We’ve got only a few hours to see if they can do it. Let’s go Kraken.