Connor McDavid set up all three Edmonton goals involving Leon Draisaitl and Evan Bouchard, and Bouchard ended a wild finish on his 27th birthday with a 4-on-3 overtime winner as the Oilers beat the Minnesota Wild 4-3 at Rogers Place on Tuesday.
Bouchard took McDavid’s pass at the top of the left circle and snapped a wrist shot over Jesper Wallstedt’s short-side shoulder 3:32 into overtime. Minnesota had been assessed a too-many-men penalty, handing Edmonton the extra ice after the Wild erased a two-goal third-period deficit.
“You take what they give you,” Bouchard said. “At that point, that was the shot. They pushed hard. They are a good hockey team and they were not going to quit. There are things to clean up, but we battled and got the win we needed.”
Edmonton moved to 7-1-1 and has taken seven of its past eight games. Devon Levi stopped 27 shots, improving to 5-1-0 since his July 1 acquisition from the Buffalo Sabres.
The Oilers needed Levi to close out a late Minnesota surge. Kirill Kaprizov scored at 10:30 of the third, finishing Matt Boldy’s rush pass from the slot high on Levi’s glove side to make it 3-2. Ryan Hartman then tied it at 13:07, converting Bobby Brink’s backhand feed from behind the Edmonton net.
“Coming back from two down on the road in the third, there is good to take from that,” Hartman said. “The too-many-men call at the end is tough. We nearly got through the kill, but that is a strong power play. Getting it tied and getting a point from a game that was not going our way was important.”
After the horn
Draisaitl scored twice on the power play, while Mathieu Joseph supplied Edmonton’s other goal. McDavid finished with three assists and stretched his opening-season scoring run to nine games, collecting 26 points on six goals and 20 assists.
McDavid reached 20 assists in nine games, the quickest any NHL player has reached that mark in a season. Pat LaFontaine, Mario Lemieux and Wayne Gretzky had previously done it in 10 games. His three helpers were also the 66th three-assist performance of his career, moving him past Ron Francis into sixth place in League history. Only Gretzky, Lemieux, Paul Coffey, Adam Oates and Sidney Crosby have more.
Minnesota opened the scoring at 3:32 of the first period. Joel Eriksson Ek worked the puck around Levi after receiving Kaprizov’s pass from below the goal line, first being denied at the left pad before recovering the puck and slipping it around the other side.
The Wild nearly doubled their lead late in the opening frame when Eriksson Ek fired several close-range attempts through traffic. Video review at 17:15 confirmed the puck never crossed the line.
Edmonton went to a two-man advantage in the final moments of the first, and Draisaitl made it count with three seconds left. McDavid delivered a no-look pass across the ice to Draisaitl at the right dot, where he drove a low one-timer past Wallstedt’s glove.
“Mentally, it was nice to go in tied,” Draisaitl said. “The other three lines were good in the first, but our line was not at its best. We needed to raise it. It was a strange game at 5-on-5.”
The remaining power-play time carried into the second, and Draisaitl struck again at 1:03. McDavid found him from behind the net, and Draisaitl sent the puck to the far side past Wallstedt’s blocker for a 2-1 lead.
Joseph pushed the margin to 3-1 at 6:01, arriving on the rebound after Alex Formenton’s slap shot from the slot.
Wallstedt made 28 saves, but Minnesota went 0-for-3 with the man advantage and killed only two of Edmonton’s five power plays.
“You cannot give a power play like that too many chances,” Wallstedt said. “I need to make more saves. It felt self-inflicted. It was not that they were better than us; it was more that we hurt ourselves.”
Kaprizov recorded a goal and an assist, while Boldy had two assists for Minnesota, now 6-2-2. The Wild had won two straight and four of five before arriving in Edmonton.
Kaprizov’s third-period goal was his 11th of the season. Through 10 games, that matches the best goal total by an active NHL player, joining McDavid in 2022-23, David Pastrnak in 2019-20 and Nikita Kucherov in 2017-18. Kaprizov’s point streak reached seven games, during which he has eight goals and six assists.
“The first period was really good, then we got into penalty killing,” Kaprizov said. “The second was not how we want to play, but the third was great. We pushed them back and spent the whole period in the offensive zone.”
Levi said Edmonton’s approach did not change after Minnesota began its comeback.
“I was focused on the next puck and not the score,” Levi said. “When you are ahead 3-1, you are not trying to protect a lead. You are trying to make saves and enjoy competing.”
Next puck drop
Edmonton hosts the Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday, when coach Babcock said forward Ryan Nugent-Hopkins is expected to make his season debut after a lower-body injury.
