It didn’t look great. An club stumbled out of the gates with a 2-9-1 start to last year’s regular season just wrapped up their 2024-25 pre-season schedule with the exact same energy. Or, rather, a lack of it.
Winding down an eight-game exhibition schedule by losing twice in convincing fashion to the Settle Kraken and by getting outscored by a combined 10-3 as teams trend closer and closer to opening-day lineups might not be the most convincing way to steady the fan base heading into the regular season. For the ones who haven’t buried their heads in the sand while telling themselves the Oilers are simply saving it up for when things actually matter, anyway. After finishing the pre-season with a pedestrian 3-5 record, the majority of which was manned by players who won’t be seeing a ton of ice time coming up, if they’re still even on the roster at all, the Oilers took a badly needed — though not so much well-earned — day off Saturday in preparation for the journey to come.
It all begins for real Wednesday (8 p.m., Sportsnet) against the visiting Winnipeg Jets, which marks the first of four home games in a span of seven days to open the regular-season schedule, while six of their first eight will be played at Rogers Place.
Theoretically, that should give the Oilers an opportunity in the first 10th of the schedule to double the amount of wins they earned by the time Jay Woodcroft was fired in mid-November of last year, after going 3-9-1 behind the bench. It was a sa.
