IN DEPTH
Each and every Sunday during the season we dig deeper into Oilers storylines with our long-form features. This week's feature is on the Oilers hockey sticks and their many configurations.
Give Patrick Maroon credit for the first ZZ-Top hat trick in NHL history.
That's a goal, an assist and three beard tugs.
All on a night when the Edmonton Oilers beat the San Jose Sharks 5-3 to win only their sixth game on home ice all season.
Hockey fans know the traditional Gordie Howe hat trick is a goal, an assist and a fight, all in the same game. Maroon got his assist in the second period and his goal in the third.
He added the last part after a wild goal-mouth scrabble near the opponents' net, when he and Sharks defenceman Brent Burns both ended up on their knees. Maroon had one arm draped over the big guy's back. Before they disengaged and got back on their skates, Maroon reached up with his glove and playfully tugged, three times, on one of the most famous beards not sported by a guitarist or bass player from the Texas rock band mentioned above.
The gap-toothed Burns just grinned and skated back to his bench.
Who wouldn't want to get a quick tug on @Burnzie88's beard?
Story: https://t.co/0VVtl87MPR pic.twitter.com/d0GmWR3WKn — @NHL
'I thought he was going to be mad'
You don't often hear laughter at an NHL game. So it's pretty cool to be reminded that even hard-nosed professional athletes can be a little playful sometimes. The two players earned a big cheer from the fans.
"It was one of those things where it was just in my face, so I decided to pull his beard," Maroon said later. "I thought he was going to be mad at first. But he certainly said, 'Hey, do you like the beard?' And I said, 'Yeah, it's a pretty nice beard.'"
Burns, naturally, was asked for his take.
"It wasn't really a tug," he said. "He was just kind of petting it."
Before all that frivolity, the game got off to the kind of start Oilers fans have seen too many times at Rogers Place this season.
The Sharks easily killed off an early penalty. Less than a minute later, Oilers winger Nathan Walker had a little Aussie-rules moment in the offensive zone when he tackled a defender. He got two minutes, because holding is a penalty in hockey.
The Sharks made the home team pay. When Oilers goalie Cam Talbot spit out a juicy rebound, Joe Palelski fired it home to put the Sharks up 1-0 before some stragglers in the crowd had even found their seats.
Two weeks ago, the Oilers might have been done right there. Lately, though, the team has shown character and drive that was too often missing not all that many games ago.
On Monday, the Oilers stuck to their game plan and were rewarded.
Maroon helped on Oilers first goal, too
Though his name will not appear on the score sheet, Maroon played a role in his team's first goal as well. When Sharks forward Thomas Hertl fired the puck over the boards in his own zone, the referees did not call a delay-of-game penalty.
Maroon was on the ice and close by, and though his opinion wasn't asked for, after the whistle he voiced it anyway, rather vociferously. The officials huddled, talked things over, and sent Hertl to the penalty box.
Once again, the Oilers didn't score with the man advantage. But two seconds after Hertl stepped out of the box, and before he got back into the play, Leon Draisaitl found an open Mark Letestu parked in the circle. Letestu's goal didn't help the team's lousy power play stats. But it did tie the game.
The line of Leon Draisaitl, Jujhar Khaira and Ryan Strome hasn't been together long. But they have created some great chemistry. They teamed up for the Oilers' second goal of the period on a beauty three-way passing play that went Khaira to Draisaitl to Strome. That put the Oilers ahead 2-1.
San Jose Sharks goalie Martin Jones (31) makes the save on Edmonton Oilers' Jesse Puljujarvi (98) during second period at Rogers Place on Monday. (Jason Franson/The Canadian Press)
Go hard to the net
They say you should go hard to the net with your stick on the ice. They say it because it's true. Drake Caggiula did just that in the second period and was briefly credited with the goal that put the Oilers up 3-1. Video review showed that Ryan Nugent-Hopkins pass, intended for Caggiula, actually deflected off a Sharks' defender. Caggiula, who played very well all night, got credited with an assist instead.
The Sharks made it 3-2 on their own deflection about two minutes later.
Halfway through the third period, Nugent-Hopkins fed a perfect pass to Maroon, who slammed a slap shot past Sharks' goalie Martin Jones to give the Oilers some breathing room.
They looked to need it when the Sharks made it 4-3. But Cam Talbot gave the Oilers solid goaltending when they needed it most, and Strome finished the night with an empty net goal, his sixth of the season, to secure the win.
The 15-17-2 Oilers are, for the moment, six points out of the final playoff spot in the Western Conference. They face St. Louis on Thursday and Montreal on Saturday, then get four days off for the Christmas break.
It seems the Edmonton Oilers are finally hitting their stride.
Ryan Strome had a pair of goals as the Oilers won their second game in a row with a 5-3 victory over the San Jose Sharks on Monday.
Edmonton defeats San Jose 5-3, Strome scores twice. 1:44
Mark Letestu, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Patrick Maroon also scored for the Oilers (15-17-2), who have won back-to-back games for just the third time this season but have victories in four of their past six.
"We have gotten the ship slowly going in the right direction the last eight or nine games," Strome said. "We have to keep it going. Obviously, the divisional games are very important. We have a lot of those in the second half and this is a good start."
Joe Pavelski, Timo Meier and Marcus Sorensen replied as the Sharks (17-11-4) lost back-to-back games.
The 10,000th @EdmontonOilers goal couldn't have been drawn up any better.
Tic-tac-toe. All @strome18 - @Drat_29 - @jujhar94. pic.twitter.com/YRlJBUa9Y4 —@NHL
"We're not as tight defensively as we have been, we've also got some guys out of the lineup who weren't out earlier in the year, too," said Sharks head coach Peter Deboer. "I think we did a good job on [Connor] McDavid tonight. I thought the difference in the game was the depth, they got some more depth scoring than we did."
San Jose started the scoring on the power play six minutes into the first period as Pavelski swooped in to put a rebound past Oilers goalie Cam Talbot, scoring his seventh goal of the season.
Letestu beat Sharks goalie Martin Jones with a one-timer shortly after an Oilers power play expired to tie the game with five minutes left in the first.
Leon Draisaitl made a perfect pass across to Strome to give him a wide-open net to deposit the puck into and give Edmonton a 2-1 lead with 1:09 left in the first. It was the 10,000th goal in Oilers' franchise history.
Edmonton added to their lead 6:30 into the second period when a Nugent-Hopkins pass hit Pavelski's stick and got past Jones.
THE NUGE? STILL HUGE. #LetsGoOilers pic.twitter.com/r1tQlzqnRf —@EdmontonOilers
San Jose got that goal right back, however, as a Tomas Hertl shot deflected off teammate Meier and in.
Maroon's ninth of the season restored the Oilers' two-goal edge eight minutes into the third.
San Jose kept coming and made it 4-3 with eight minutes left as Sorensen made a nice deke to record his second goal.
Strome put the game away with an empty-netter.
There was a comical moment in the game as Maroon playfully tugged on Sharks defenceman Brent Burns beard a few times after the pair had gotten tangled on the ice behind the San Jose net.
"It was just in my face and I decided to pull it," Maroon said. "I thought he would be mad at first, but he just asked me if I liked it and I said yeah, it's a pretty nice beard."
Just making sure it's real. 🧔🏻 #LetsGoOilers pic.twitter.com/3VPS1P6OgB —@EdmontonOilers
Both teams are off until Thursday, when the Sharks return home to host the Canucks and the Oilers play the second game of a three-game homestand against St. Louis.
The Edmonton Oilers have activated defenceman Adam Larsson from injured reserve.
Larsson is expected to play tonight when the Oilers face the San Jose Sharks at Rogers Place.
The defenceman has missed the past eight games with upper-body injury. He last played on Nov. 28 in a 3-2 overtime win against the Arizona Coyotes.
The Oilers posted a 4-4 record with Larsson out of the lineup.
The 25-year-old has been a mainstay on the Oilers defence for the past two seasons.
Larsson likely to make return to #Oilers lineup as they battle Sharks for first time since eliminating them from playoff contention in April. https://t.co/YKq8pPHyTD — @EdmontonOilers
The trade that brought him to Edmonton in June 2016, which sent former No. 1 draft pick Taylor Hall to the New Jersey Devils, has been much-discussed and, in some quarters, much criticized.
Critics accuse general manger Peter Chiarelli of trading away a goal-scoring left winger for a stay-at-home defenceman.
But others credit the trade with solidifying the Oilers defence.
Larsson, the No. 4 pick in the 2011 draft, has played in 25 games with the Oilers this season, and has three goals and one assist.
He has played 378 career NHL games and has 16 goals and 76 assists.
On Monday, the Oilers also assigned forward Anton Slepyshev to the Bakersfield Condors of the American Hockey League.
