In Nashville, a 3-3 game through two periods of play turned into a joke in the third, on Monday night.
Leon Draisaitl scored three of his four goals on the night, in that final frame; the Edmonton Oilers scored five in total to whack the Predators, 8-3.
“I don’t need to beat around the bush. When you score four goals, you feel good,” Draisaitl said. “You feel good. You feel good about yourself. You feel good about your linemates, and obviously they made some great plays to me tonight, made it pretty easy for me.”
Mike Smith made 27 saves in the win.
“I just thought the whole game, we had some pushes, but we didn’t sustain anything,” Nashville coach John Hynes said. “I think tonight we got what we deserved. We had a couple pushes. We come out and tie the game early in the second, but it’s a short little situation where we actually played a couple shifts where we played the right way.”
Nick Bonino, Roman Josi and Calle Jarnkrok scored for the Predators before seemingly everyone took the rest of the night off.
“I think everyone was pretty mad because we knew through our own mistakes we kind of gave them a couple goals,” the Oilers’ Darnell Nurse said, ” That’s a good team that’s got a lot to play for this time of year too, and they played desperate and made us pay when we had some mistakes. So we have to clean those up, but the way we came out in the third and bought in and just played our game, we didn’t let the second (period) discourage us.”
Connor McDavid, Kailer Yamamoto, Josh Archibald, and Zack Kassian all added single markers for the Oilers.
“We had a good first period, and then we kind of blow it in the second,” McDavid said. “I thought we did a good job of rebounding, obviously. It’s not every period that you’re going to get five, so that was good.”
[WATCH: All Oilers vs. Predators highlights]
Pekka Rinne made 23 saves before getting the hook in the third period, after all eight goals were scored by the Oilers.
“We got punched in the face today pretty good and certainly got what we deserved,” Hynes said. “If we show up to play like we played tonight, then that’s lots of times what the result is going to be this time of year.”
Juuse Saros made four saves in a mop up role.
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