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What Edmonton Oilers players said after embarrassing loss on home ice

Preston Hodgkinson
Preston Hodgkinson
|
Nov 9 2025, 1:00 pm
What Edmonton Oilers players said after embarrassing loss on home ice
@EdmontonOilers/X

The Edmonton Oilers may have hit rock bottom on Saturday night.

All eyes were on their Hockey Night in Canada matchup with the Western Conference-leading Colorado Avalanche. The season had been a struggle up to this point, and this was an easy game to get up for. Surely, this Oilers team would put in a competitive effort to make this an exciting one for the national audience, right?

Not even close. Instead, the Oilers put up their worst performance of the season, allowing the Avalanche to stomp all over them, to the tune of a 9-1 drubbing that tied the worst margin of defeat on home ice in franchise history.

It was a long, painful, and embarrassing trek to the final buzzer as the Oilers’ faithful were relieved that they could begin to forget about the game. That sour mood followed into the Edmonton dressing room, with defenceman Jake Walman giving the game a pretty good summary to reporters.

“We deserve this tonight,” Walman said. “Not really trending the right direction for a while, and [the Avalanche] kicked our ass tonight.

“We all gotta figure out who we are as individuals and then what we want to be as a team. We’re lacking a little bit of identity right now.”

Once again, the offence sputtered to create, the defence allowed Colorado to do whatever they pleased, and both goaltenders got lit up. Stuart Skinner was pulled after four goals, and Calvin Pickard followed it up with five more.

This is a team that has gone to consecutive Stanley Cup Finals and now, suddenly, they are in the midst of an identity crisis. It’s not the worst-case scenario for this Oilers squad, but it feels pretty close to it.

Andrew Mangiapane thought the team failed to show up for the entire game.

“Right from puck drop, I’d say we were flat,” Mangiapane said. “We’re a good team, and you see it in stretches throughout games where we dominate, but then there are times where we fall asleep. Today was an example of that, where we just fell asleep the whole game.”

The question of how close the Oilers think they are to the Avalanche after that kind of result was thrown around in the aftermath. Colorado now improved to 9-1-5, to the top of the NHL standings, while Edmonton fell to 6-6-4, and now sits second-to-last in the Pacific Division.

Going into the game, some might think that these two teams were somewhat comparable. Two Western Conference giants that are expected to be top contenders. Now, it doesn’t feel like the Oilers are in the same universe as the Avalanche.

Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch seemed to agree that the gap between his club and the league’s best right now is not a short one.

“We’re not even close,” Knoblauch said. “There’s a team that’s playing really well, and we’re not. It’s not just one game; if you look at the last few weeks, they’ve been going pretty well, we haven’t.

“Right now, we have a lot of work to do.”

This will not be an easy game to forget for the Oilers, but that might be a good thing. Now this team knows what it feels like to get kicked in the mouth on home ice, and the sting that it leaves.

Going forward, this should give Edmonton all the motivation in the world to ensure that they don’t have a repeat performance.

First shot of redemption lands on Monday, when the Columbus Blue Jackets roll into town.

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