Oilers v. Sharks - Psalm 68:21-23

God will smash the heads of our enemies,
crushing the skulls of those who have harmed us.
The Lord says, "I will bring you to your enemies in San Jose,
I will bring them to you from the depths of the sea.
You, my people, will cleanse yourselves with their blood,
and even your twelfth forward will get his share."

Edmonton Oilers @ San Jose Sharks

SAP Center, 8:30 p.m. MST
Television: Sportsnet

The Race to the Bottom (It's Happening Again):

Visiting Team Scouting Report: The San Jose Sharks are a very good team. Tyler Dellow recently wrote an article about how many shots the Oilers have allowed since Ben Scrivens came to town. He discovered that a team gets 50 shots in a game once every 217 games, and that the Oilers were about 41 times more likely than the average team to allow 50 or more shots in a game that Scrivens started. The Sharks are basically the opposite of this. They've reached the 50-shot plateau six times this season (and had 49 on the weekend against Colorado). That makes for 50 shots in a game every 12.7 games or about 17 times more frequently than the average team. They'll have a great chance to make that number more impressive tonight against the Oilers.

Expected Lineups:

Edmonton Oilers (25-39-9):

Hall - Gagner - Perron
Lander - Nugent-Hopkins - Eberle
Hendricks - Gordon - Pitlick
Smyth - Acton - Larsen

Marincin - Petry
Fraser - Schultz
Klefbom - Belov

Scrivens

San Jose Sharks (47-20-9):

Pavelski - Thornton - Burns
Marleau - Couture - Nieto
Sheppard - Wingels - Havlat
Brown - Desjardins - Kennedy

Vlasic - Braun
Irwin - Boyle
Stuart - Hannan

Niemi

By The Numbers:

• Anton Lander has looked better during this stint in the NHL than he did during his first season with the Oilers, but at some point he's going to need to start putting up some crooked numbers if he hopes to stay in the league. Lander has just one assist in twenty games so far this season. That assist came during his most recent call-up, which is now eight games long and has seen him receive no less than 14:39 of ice time in any game.
  
• Mike Brown has played forty-four games for the Sharks this season, and has averaged about seven and a half minutes of ice time per game. The Sharks are an excellent team, so it's surprising to me that Brown has seen more ice with them than he did with the Oilers.
  
• The Oilers have brought Will Acton back to the Oilers. He probably still isn't an NHL player on a good team, but Acton has had the best offensive season of his career in the AHL (0.50 points per game compared to his previous high of 0.28), and of course, played in the NHL for the first time. It hasn't been a good year for very many people in the Oilers' organization, but it's been a good year for Will Acton.