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Oilers Waste 2 1/2 Hours of Their Fans' Lives

If you watched this game without some sort of commitment that forced you to, such as writing a post-game summary, then I'm not sure why you didn't change the channel. You should have.

By Alan Hull
Russell LaBounty-USA TODAY Sport

Off the start, I'd like to thank our resident post-game writer @OilFanInYYC for picking tonight of all nights to be unavailable to write the post-game. This morning, it looked like a sweet chance to have something positive to write. Oilers have won 4 of 5, playing the lowly Blue Jackets, the game is an early start time...great! Little did I know.

The Lowlights

The Story

Well, the Oilers were terrible early, terrible in the middle, and started terrible late, but sprung to life in the final few minutes to put two on the board and at least put a mild scare into Columbus before flaccidly wilting away without a huge push in the final 120 seconds.

A few things worth pointing out. Throughout the entire first period, the two teams basically traded opportunities to let the other team take control of the game. Neither group was good, but the Oilers were worse and managed to come out down a goal.

The second period started in truly legendary fashion. before the 90 second mark of the period, Nick Schultz took a penalty, followed by another one only 12 seconds later as Jeff Petry was called for putting the puck over the glass. With two of the team's top penalty killing Dmen (by ice-time) in the box during a 3v5, obviously Andrew Ference was (the remaining regular PKer on the blueline) was going to see a lot of the kill time. And that's what happened, until Ference took a rather unnecessary holding penalty during the 3v5 to extend the two-man disadvantage to well over two minutes and put all three of the team's primary penalty killing defencemen in the box.

What's that you say? Sounds like a scenario where the Jackets may be likely to score? Well you would be right.

By the end of the 2nd, it was 4-0 CBJ and Coach Eakins made a change in goal for the third despite the score not really being the fault of Ilya Bryzgalov. I don't blame him for making the switch, and while you can't lay this game at the feet of Bryz, it may have been a good idea to have started Dubnyk in the first place.

Just after the mid-point of the third period, Sam Gagner somehow scored from the corner behind the goal line to break the shut out and Jordan Eberle added a PP goal on a very nice wrist shot to make the score look far more generous to the Oilers than the game should have been.

The entire night, the Oilers players were missing one another with passes, mis-reading one another's routes and throwing passes in front or behind each other and basically looking like a team who didn't know how to communicate with one another.

On top of it all, Boyd Gordon appeared to injure himself on a play where he crashed into the net during a penalty kill (at least, to my eyes, that's where it happened) and left the game. No word yet on the extent of his injury or if he will miss any time.

Honestly, its gotta be pretty difficult to get beaten that badly by a team as poor as these Blue Jackets have shown to be through two meetings with the Oilers this season. They weren't remotely impressive, but it was still enough to mop the floor with the Oilers tonight.

Was Twitter At Least Fun?

Not especially. But there were a few things that were mildly entertaining...

I don't like to criticize non-players in my posts if I can avoid it, but I thought this was quite funny...

Other than that, nothing much to smile at tonight.

I will leave you though with this to try and end on a brighter note. Here is what the legendary Ben Massey's post-game would have looked like tonight:

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