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Edmonton Oilers hint at inspiring intermission pep talk that helped get big win

Preston Hodgkinson
Preston Hodgkinson
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Oct 29 2025, 12:00 pm
Edmonton Oilers hint at inspiring intermission pep talk that helped get big win
Perry Nelson/Imagn Images

For a second, it looked like the Edmonton Oilers were cruising to another uninspired loss on Tuesday night.

The Utah Mammoths had come into Rogers Place and absolutely run over the Oilers through the first period. The score read 2-0 for the Utahns after 20 minutes, but it felt like Edmonton was close to losing control of things. But then they found a way to take back control.

It took the Oilers just three minutes to tie things at the start of the second period, and they wound up putting five goals on the board in the second period to take a 5-3 lead. They would add an empty-netter in the dying minutes of the third period to seal the deal with a 6-3 victory.

Connor McDavid led the way with two goals, while Leon Draisaitl, Ike Howard, Mattias Ekholm, and Ty Emberson rounded out the scoring.

Edmonton was a noticeably different team coming out of that first intermission, and that was no fluke. Multiple players hinted that there were some words said after that dismal opening frame that helped get the team back to playing good hockey.

“We kinda needed a bit of a wake-up in between the first and the second, we had that a bit,” Ryan Nugent Hopkins said. “Knobber coming in, talking about what we did in the first, and just talking amongst ourselves, give ourselves a little kick in the butt.

“You know, Knobber, his demeanour is pretty calm most of the time… He wasn’t screaming at us by any means, but we needed to be better.”

Nugent-Hopkins was once again excellent for the Oilers, picking up an assist on a second-period McDavid marker. It doesn’t sound like head coach Kris Knoblauch was giving the team the gears as much as it was the players themselves rallying together.

Ekholm gave more of a clear look at how that intermission played out.

“Everybody felt enough was enough,” Ekholm said. “I haven’t liked my game at all the last five, six games, I don’t think many guys in here have. It was coming to a point where we needed to start putting our work boots on… We found our game, and that’s gotta be the standard going forward.

“Hopefully, we learned from this tonight.”

It’s been another poor start to the season for the Oilers, but it has been their best start since Ekholm joined the team halfway through the 2022-23 campaign. He joked that maybe people watching this team should probably give them a little patience, considering how they’ve parlayed these bad starts into two consecutive trips to the Stanley Cup Final.

“Maybe everyone needs to take a deep breath every once in a while, none mentioned,” Ekholm said with a smile.

This isn’t to say Knoblauch didn’t have some inspiring words between periods. The coach gave the media a little look into what his messaging was to the team in that moment.

“From the coaching staff, our message was we have to work, we can’t come and show up and think our skill is going to take over and win us hockey games,” Knoblauch said. “We turned over the puck on line rushes, I counted 16 times… It was really easy for them.

“Guys went to work and, obviously, it got a lot better.”

This is a veteran team that has been unable to figure out the month of October for quite some time now. Tuesday night saw a solid 40-minute effort after a couple of 20-minute efforts over the weekend.

If they can find a way to move that up to 60 minutes, we should be watching the Oilers club that we all expected at the start of the season any day now.

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