WARNINGWPG
Rush defense leaked all night
Gave up 27 rush shots worth 2.33 xG (4 goals) — transition gaps were there every period.
Tighten neutral-zone structure and keep D gaps closed on entries.
The verdict · earned
The Oilers earned it — the game and the expected-goals battle both.
WPG 2 · EDM 5
Preseason · exhibition
Split squads and prospects, not the club that will take the ice in October. The shots and grades below describe this game only: nothing here counts toward season records, form, rankings or player numbers.
◆ By the ModelSep 22, 10:30 PMxG: xgboost-0.758Edited for clarityDrafted from NHL play-by-play by Backcheck's model, worded for clarity by an AI editor that may not change a number. Nobody at Backcheck was at the rink. How this works
Edmonton beat Winnipeg 5-2, and by the end it looked like exactly what a five-goal spread suggests: the Oilers pulling away. C. McDavid scored and set up another. R. Shea had a goal and two helpers. E. Bouchard set up four goals. The Jets never got the third goal that would have made it interesting.
But this was a much tighter hockey game than 5-2 ever tells you. Play it out and Winnipeg opened the scoring — P. Ford converted just under two minutes into the first period — and for a stretch it looked like their game. Edmonton answered twice before intermission, first through Shea off a Draisaitl-Bouchard feed, then McDavid himself. The separation came in the second period: a Draisaitl power-play goal, set up by McDavid and Bouchard, made it 1-3, and A. Formenton followed less than two minutes later off another Bouchard-Shea combination to push it to 1-4. Winnipeg's J. Julien got one back in the third, but Colton Dach's wrist shot from a sharp angle — an empty-netter with Winnipeg chasing the game — closed it out at 5-2.
Here's the disconnect: strip away the score and the underlying play says this was close to a coin flip. Expected goals finished 3.21-2.88, a 53-47% split in Edmonton's favor — nowhere near a blowout margin. Shot attempts leaned the Oilers' way too, 57% of them, but that's a comfortable edge, not a rout. High-danger chances were 3-2 Edmonton. None of that predicts a three-goal final.
What actually did was finishing and goaltending swinging hard in Edmonton's favor. The Oilers scored 1.79 goals more than their expected-goals workload said they should have — elite shooting, a hot night, or both. Winnipeg went the other way, scoring 0.88 goals below expectation. That gap alone explains most of the scoreboard gap that the shot totals don't.
Goaltending told the same story from the other end. T. Jarry stopped 15 of 16 for Edmonton, saving 1.20 goals above expected before M. Tomkins finished it off; across the two, Edmonton's tandem posted a plus-0.88 mark on the night. Winnipeg's T. Milic stopped 23 of 27 but was 0.79 goals below expected — not a disastrous night, just a below-average one at the wrong time.
The number that should worry Winnipeg longer-term isn't the score, it's the track record: Edmonton generated 27 rush shots worth 2.33 expected goals, and did damage off the rush all night. Winnipeg's own offense also created plenty — 21 shot attempts off the rush worth 1.84 expected goals — but couldn't finish at Edmonton's rate. Both special-teams units went cold, with Winnipeg 0-for-2 and Edmonton 0-for-1 on the power play against a league rate near 21%, so that wasn't the difference either. This was a game Edmonton could have won by one. They won it by three because the bounces and the goaltending both broke their way.