Connor McDavid torched the Nashville Predators Tuesday night in Edmonton, recording his 14th career hat trick as the Oilers blew out the Nashville Predators, 6-2.
McDavid is now up to 28 goals on the season. He kicked off the scoring for the Oilers in the first period, finding the back of the net on the power play. It marked the seventh straight game that Nashville has given up the first goal of the night.
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“We knew they’d push and we knew there’d be some chaos, but we handled it fairly well,” Predators head coach Andrew Brunette said. “When they racked up three goals, that’s hard to come back from, but our group is resilient. We had a power play at the start of the third period and we weren’t sharp and that kind of changed a little bit of the momentum in that period.”
Edmonton poured it on in the second period, scoring three unanswered goals, to bump its lead to 3-0. McDavid netted his second goal of the night in the second frame on a penalty shot when Adam Wilsby held him on a breakaway.
“I thought it was kind of a soft call on the penalty shot and then we give up three quick ones,” Ryan O’Reilly said. “It wasn’t great by any means, but we were still in it there. We didn’t manage the puck like we normally do and against the team, it just feeds them.”
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The Predators showed a little bit of life in the third period as Ryan O’Reilly scored his 12th of the season to snap Connor Ingram’s shutout bid.
Nic Hague let a shot go that rebounded off of Ingram’s right pad and onto O’Reilly’s stick for the easy put-back goal. Luke Evangelista was credited with a secondary assist.
15 seconds later, Nick Blankenburg ripped a long shot from the left point that found the back of the net to cut Edmonton’s lead to. 4-2. Reid Schaefer and Michael Bunting were awarded the assists.
Leon Drisaitl restored the Oilers ‘ three-goal lead, and McDavid added insurance in the final minute of the game, netting his third goal of the night.
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Nashville was dominated by the Oilers, getting outshot 43-26 and winning just 43.3% of the total face-offs. Juuse Saros made 37 saves on 43 shots, which is the most shots he’s faced in a single game this season.
“We have to be sharper all the way through for 60 minutes,” O’Reilly said. “We’ve got to reset tomorrow and get ready for our next one, but we know in this room we can be a very good team and it’s sticking to our game plan.”
The Predators fall to 19-19-4 on the season and are three points outside of a Wild Card spot with 42 points. They wrap up their seven-game road trip going 4-3-0.
Nashville returns to Bridgestone Arena on Thursday against the New York Islanders at 7 p.m. CST.
