What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
If that’s the case, perhaps we should start calling the local professional pucksters the Mighty Oil.
On the day Connor McDavid was winging his way back to Edmonton from his mini version of Whatever It Takes , the Edmonton Oilers added another name to the injured list Tuesday in No. 1 defenceman Oscar Klefbom.
Out two to three weeks. Shoulder injury.
Whatever It Takes , indeed.
“They’re starting to pile up a little bit,” is how head coach Dave Tippett understated it after practice Tuesday.
“It’s certainly a big hole,” he added of the 25-plus minutes Klefbom munches every night.
So much attention has been focused on what Leon Draisaitl, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Kailer Yamamoto have been giving this group, Klefbom hasn’t really been given his due for the part he’s played on the back end. He’s been outstanding and made those around him better too.
When it comes to the Oilers, the late Howard Cosell should have been at the mic.
“Down goes McDavid.”
“Down goes Klefbom.”
“Out goes Zack Kassian.”
“Down goes James Neal.”
“Down goes Kris Russell!”
“Down goes Joakim Nygard!”
How you compute the current extent of the Oilers injury/suspension situation depends on how you want to score it.
If you add Sam Gagner and Kyle Brodziak to McDavid, Klefbom, Kassian, Neal, Russell and Nygard, that’s eight.
Perhaps more meaningful might be their annual salaries — McDavid’s $12.5 million, Klefbom’s $4.16 million, Neal’s $5.17 million, Russell’s $4 million, Gagner’s $3.15 million, Kassian’s $1.95 million, Brodziak’s $1.15 million and Nygard’s $925,000.
Or you could use average minutes played per game — Klefbom’s 25.36, McDavid’s 22.04, Russell’s 17.01, Neal’s 16.39, Kassian’s 15.54, Gagner’s 13.03 and Nygard’s 10.41.
No matter how you score it, with seven players in Edmonton who have worn the uniform of the AHL’s Bakersfield Condors this season, and with another on the way, the butcher bill is getting staggering.
With the Oilers having just won three of four without McDavid to, at least temporarily, breathe the rare air of first place in the Pacific Division, whether you look at it in terms of man games they’re losing each night, dollars they are paying out to players out of the line-up or minutes of ice time not being munched, it’s staggering.
And Wednesday night, the team that certainly appears to have discovered a resolve it didn’t necessarily know it possessed, for the always dreaded first-game-back-from-a-road-trip, the Oilers will welcome the first-place-overall Boston Bruins to Rogers Place.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?
“I think adversity does make you stronger,” Tippett said when I threw that out there for him to bat around instead of the flip side cliche: ‘Are you concerned that this could be the straw that broke the camel’s back?’
“We’ve talked about it as a team. I give our guys a ton of credit. They’ve hunkered down,” he began. “We want to play a good, hard, structured style and make sure work ethic is at a premium.
“I give Leon Draisaitl a ton of credit for that because of how well he’s played, the minutes he’s carried and the effect he’s had on the game. When your top player in the lineup is playing that hard, the rest of your players have to play as hard as that guy is playing, themselves.
“Our guys are working hard and understand what they have to do to be successful and that goes from the top guys to the guys who are getting more opportunity and the guys coming up from the minors.”
I asked Tippett to revisit a statement he made about welcoming the incredibly tight standings in the playoff race in terms of what he would learn about the team, and to quantify that with the added challenges involving injuries.
“I should probably rephrase that. It’s not what I learned about the team, it’s what the team learns about the team. You hear guys comment like they did after our game the other day (in Carolina) about having to play a certain way to be successful. That’s not me. That’s them.
“That’s the players themselves recognizing how hard they have to work to play to win. These guys are learning a lot about each other as teammates and a lot about how they have to play to be successful and it’s great to see them get results because that pushes that message along much quicker.”
One thing about the Klefbom injury, he’s been so important to what’s been happening here with the Oilers’ 12-4-2 run dating back to New Year’s Eve, maybe he takes one fear away.
One former pro coach warned me the other day: “Mark my words, the day McDavid comeback back this entire team will take a giant breath of relief and immediately go and lose three or four games.”
E-mail: [email protected]
On Twitter: @ByTerryJones
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