Beat CHI and Dallas then fall to colorado

Ya the team at the conference finals will be hard to go against.

Non-Oilers fans on here think the Oilers will struggle once the refs put their whistles away in the playoffs. Georges at Lowetide posted an interesting rebuttal:

“… referees often put away the whistle in the playoffs.”

No, they don’t.

It’s easy to check.

Here’s the team PP report for 2018-19:

http://www.nhl.com/stats/teams?aggregate=0&report=powerplay&reportType=season&seasonFrom=20182019&seasonTo=20182019&gameType=2&filter=gamesPlayed,gte,1&sort=ppOpportunitiesPerGame&page=0&pageSize=100

And here’s the team PP report for the 2018-19 playoffs:

http://www.nhl.com/stats/teams?aggregate=0&report=powerplay&reportType=season&seasonFrom=20182019&seasonTo=20182019&gameType=3&filter=gamesPlayed,gte,1&sort=ppOpportunitiesPerGame&page=0&pageSize=100

The median PP Opportunities per GP in the regular season was 2.88. The median PP Opportunities per GP in the playoffs was 3.09. You can check other recent years to see if that holds up. I checked 16-17 and 17-18 and saw that it did.

I think 11 of the 16 playoff teams had more PP Opps per GP in the playoffs.

Interestingly, all 5 of the teams that saw a drop in their PP Opps lost in the first round.

Like any team, depends how good the goaltending is

Of course. It looks pretty even though.

Koskinen: 18-13-3, 2.75 GAA, .917 sv%
Crawford: 16-20-3, 2.77 GAA, .917 sv%

It's an interesting matchup between the pipes. We haven't seen Koskinen in big games in NA, Smith has a history of being unreal in the playoffs, I think Koskinen starts but on a short leash

Crawford we know is a good playoff goalie, but these aren't the same Hawks.

Dehaan back on defence helps the hawks out a lot. Crows numbers look bad because the defence was bad all year. Still not sure we can slow down McDavid and draisitle but dehaan back helps a lot

Ya they don’t know what they are talking about. The oilers will be just fine as well as we play good, and it doesn’t matter if they put their whistles away anyway. In my opinion we will beat Chicago and Dallas, but we have a chance of beating whoever is in the conference finals but it may be hard. I think the main reason why non-oilers fans say that we will play horribly is because they think we are only good on the PP (which we aren’t) I think we are good on 5on5 as well.