The End Is Near: Oilers dig 3-0 grave in Game 3 loss to Panthers

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At least it was quick.

Painless is another story — Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final is going to hurt Edmonton and the vanquished Oilers for a very long time.

But, if it’s any consolation, this will all be over soon.

In a second period that fans who paid as much as $1,000 a ticket would love to forget, but never will, the Panthers all but won the series with three goals in 6:19 Thursday night, turning a 1-1 game into a catastrophic implosion and the Stanley Cup Final into a funeral march.

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The Oilers, as they always do, fought back hard from a seemingly hopeless position, but fell short, and the 4-3 defeat leaves them one loss away from a sweep that ends their season.

“We’re trying to figure them out,” sighed Oilers captain Connor McDavid, his team running out of time to find an answer. “We haven’t beaten them in three games. We’ve had stretches of good, we’ve had stretches of bad. We’re trying to figure them out.”

A comeback at this point seems impossible. Edmonton has been outscored 11-4 in the series and 21-8 in five overall meetings with Florida this year. Their best players are stuck in neutral (Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins don’t have a point in the series) and their power play is stuck in the mud (0-10).

The Oilers have been very good at times, just not long enough. And they don’t have the hands to outscore their mistakes right now.

“It’s 3-0, that’s the only frustration,” said McDavid, on a night when Edmonton’s goals came from Warren Foegele, Philip Broberg and Ryan McLeod. “It doesn’t matter how the games went. All the matters is the result. We can say we’ve liked things but it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.”

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Running the table against these Panthers will take a miracle.

“We can string together a lot of wins, we’ve shown it,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, hoping some of the magic from that 16-game winning streak in January returns in a hurry. “The stakes are higher and we’re playing a better team than what we faced in the regular season, but I don’t think there is any doubt in my mind.”

Game 3 wasn’t a case of Edmonton being run out of the rink, just an extension of what we saw in the first two games. Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky robbed them on their best chances, Edmonton made costly, glaring miscues at just the wrong time and all of the things that made the Oilers such a resilient, dangerous team through the regular season and first three rounds can’t push through and make an impact.

“Just a couple too many mistakes that seemingly just all ended up going in the back of our net,” said Draisaitl. “We just need to find a way, tweak a couple of things and try to get one back.”

On a night when the Oilers needed to be at their best, they weren’t.

With the Edmonton bursting in anticipation of the first Stanley Cup Final game here in 18 years and the Oilers fighting for their playoff lives, you kind of expected the roof to come off of Rogers Place in the first period.

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It didn’t happen. Aside from a couple of unsuccessful power plays, the Oilers didn’t look at all like the desperate, shot-out-of-a-cannon team the situation demanded. Florida played it tight and cool, and thanks to some big-time saves from Bobrovsky, scoreless until Sam Reinhart put the visitors on the board with a doorstep redirection at 18:58.

The second period started out the way the first period should have, with Warren Foegele scoring on a breakaway at 1:49, the Oilers doling out a couple of hits and the building in full roar. The Oilers were back in the game.

“Hell of a start,” said Knoblauch. “We had a couple of breakaways, some solid chances. We didn’t score on those but I liked where we were going. We had some really good chances to go ahead. Then they dump the puck in and it’s 2-1.”

It was the beginning of the end. Goalie Stuart Skinner didn’t play the dump in well, defenceman Cody Ceci allowed the pass into the slot and nobody was there to cover Vladimir Tarasenko. All of the energy Edmonton had been building got snuffed like a candle.

That was at 9:12. At 13:57 Sam Bennett made it 3-2 and 15:31 Aleksander Barkov made it 4-1. All the goals were off the kind of defensive mistakes the Oilers have been trying to wash out of their game all season.

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“After they got that second on they got on a roll,” said Skinner. “We kind of let them take the momentum and they got two more quick ones on silly mistakes that don’t need to happen.”

The Oilers launched their furious comeback attempt in the third period, cutting it to 4-2 on a goal from Broberg with 13:58 left and 4-3 on McLeod’s goal with 5:17 left.

But the goal that mattered never came.

“We battled all the way to the end, that’s the kind of team we’ve got,” said Skinner. “I think we can be an amazing team and I know that we can find a way to beat these guys.”

Now it’s 3-0 Panthers and what little hope remains is probably false.

“I’m not sure what the stats are in coming back from this,” said Skinner. “But if anyone can do it it’s the Oil.”

E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com

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