EDMONTON - The Oilers are like your typical teenagers.
They sleep in, which would explain the slow starts.
They're easily bored or distracted, which would explain the second period lulls.
And they've got young, fresh legs, which would explain why they own the late rounds.
They followed the pattern again Saturday against St. Louis when the youngest player in the league provided another You-Were-There moment, scoring on a breakway 23 seconds into overtime to beat the Blues 2-1.
"It's obviously fun to score an overtime winner, it's my first," said Taylor Hall, who has six goals in his last eight games. "I don't think (Saturday) was necessarily my strongest game, but you have to find ways to get it done."
In style, as it turned out. Like scoring two goals at the Air Canada Centre wasn't a big enough stage, Hall scores the OT winner a game later on Hockey Night in Canada.
"He's a special kind of player," said teammate Ryan Jones. "He does things that I don't even dream of."
Ryan Whitney wonders where all the people are who were calling for Hall to go back to junior because he wasn't brilliant in his first eight games.
"I'd like to talk to the people who were thinking that, that's a good one," he laughed. "I told him after that he's becoming a pretty effective player, a star almost, in the making. For all those people who were on him in the beginning, it just takes a while. In Game 82 he's going to be even better than he is right now."
Thanks to Hall's winner, the Oilers have outscored their opponents 13-2 in the third period of the last six games — 1-0 against Colorado, 2-1 against San Jose, 3-0 against Ottawa, 3-0 against Montreal and 2-0 against Toronto.
"We're a third-period team, we tend to turn it around," grinned Jones, who scored his second third period goal in as many games to give Edmonton a 1-0 lead. "I don't know if it's the youthful legs we have in here, but we just found a way to get angry and pull together and pull it off."
It was scoreless after 40 minutes as neither Edmonton, on a three-game winning streak and St. Louis, on a four-game losing streak, couldn't make a step of progress.
After taking the lead on Jones's goal 2:32 into the third, the Oilers were looking for back-to-back shutouts for the first time since December 2002, when another former teammate came back to haunt them.
Eric Brewer broke Edmonton's goose egg at 13:33 of the third period with a shot in the top corner. The Oilers hadn't been scored on since the 10:02 of the second period against Montreal two games ago, a stretch of 146 minutes.
Edmonton closed the deal, though,
"The first half of the game was not the effort we need, hopefully it's just because of the travel we had, but if you win on those nights it helps," said Whitney, who picked up his 21st assist to go with zero goals. "Our goalie played great and we had a really good third period."
The Oilers have now won four in a row and six of their last eight to pull out of their death spiral, something they've been incapable of the last few years.
"It's a different team this year, there's more of a belief in here for some reason," said captain Shawn Horcoff. "Maybe it's just youth and being naive or something, I think we all believe in ourselves that we're a good team and we can make things happen. It's not too late to make a bit of a push here and get ourselves back in a chase for a playoff spot."
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robert.tychkowski@sunmedia.ca
