Lazerus: Leon Draisaitl creates a one-legged legacy to remember, even in defeat

EDMONTON — Leon Draisaitl, at this point held together by Scotch Tape, fishing wire, used chewing gum and sheer defiance, leaped out of his seat on the bench as Ryan Nugent-Hopkins pounced on a botched Colorado pass and roofed a backhander over Pavel Francouz to give the Oilers their first lead of the game.

Draisaitl was smiling on the way up. But then he landed, his face contorted into a grimace, and for a moment, you had to wonder if his ankle had finally detached from his foot for good.

It was hard to watch Draisaitl in Game 4 of the Western Conference final on Monday night. But it was impossible to turn away. Every stride, every pivot looked agonizing. He’d barrel through the neutral zone, then gingerly step off the ice. He’d will himself through an odd-man rush, then trudge slowly back to the bench. It was as if he’d get a momentary reprieve from the pain from a shot of adrenaline, then it would all come flooding back the moment the play died, or the puck was frozen, or the goal was scored.

Then, with 3:32 left in the game and the Oilers’ season hanging by the same thread as his ankle, Draisaitl hammered a shot that Zack Kassian stuffed past Francouz.

It was Draisaitl’s fourth primary assist of the game. His 32nd point of the postseason. His third four-assist game of the playoffs.

On one leg.

It was excruciating. It was exhilarating. It was courageous. It was madness.

And most agonizing of all, it was not enough. In a rollicking, riveting affair, the Colorado Avalanche advanced to the Stanley Cup Final with a 6-5 victory on Artturi Lehkonen’s goal 79 seconds into overtime. Draisaitl’s one-legged heroics now become a mere footnote of hockey history, an all-time postseason performance that ultimately proved futile. In the cruel zero-sum game that is the playoffs, a terrific season followed by an otherworldly postseason for Draisaitl and Connor McDavid simply becomes another squandered year of the brilliant duo’s primes.

In fact, Draisaitl will probably spend his summer reliving his shanked one-timer on a power play at 11:15 of the third period, when he had an open net at which to shoot and instead hit the outside of the post. All postseason long, his one-timer seemed to suffer the most from his unstable ankle, and it betrayed him one last time at the worst imaginable moment. Two minutes later, Nathan MacKinnon scored out of the penalty box. So a potential 5-3 Oilers lead became a 4-4 tie. Seventy-seven seconds later, Mikko Rantanen gave the Avs a 5-4 lead before Kassian put in Draisaitl’s rebound to send the game to overtime. But the missed one-timer loomed large, a twist of fate for a player who deserved better.

Of course, it’s folly to put even the slightest bit of blame on Draisaitl. Mike Smith’s misadventures, poor discipline, a stagnant power play, Evander Kane’s suspension and the speed and depth and brilliance of the Avalanche are all why the Oilers were swept. Draisaitl, like McDavid, was herculean in even carrying the team this far, both of them coming up with performances for the ages. But two spectacular players can’t overcome a well-constructed team with superstars of its own, not in the ultimate team sport.

But if nothing else good comes from this series for Edmonton, let Draisaitl’s performance serve as some solace. Somehow both underrated and one of the two or three best players in the world, Draisaitl toils in the shadow of McDavid, perhaps the most talented player ever to play the game. If ever there were a “quiet” 55-goal, 55-assist season by a one-time Hart Trophy winner, Draisaitl had it in 2021-22. But while McDavid was every bit as brilliant this postseason, with 33 points and another three-point effort in Game 4, Draisaitl’s guts and guile and grit and greatness were transcendent — and worth remembering.

Draisaitl, of course, downplayed his own situation. Hockey doesn’t allow for self-aggrandizement.

“There’s lots of guys that go through painful things like that,” he said. “I’m not going to make this about myself. Lots of guys that play through certain injuries.”

True. But by all reasonable human thought, Draisaitl should not have been playing hockey. But hockey is anything but reasonable, these guys are something more than human, and the only thought in their minds is that they may never get this close to a Stanley Cup again. Hey, pain is fleeting. Championships are forever.

It’s admirable in its own twisted way, but of course, it’s inadvisable, too. Hockey culture reveres such toughness, which only encourages players further to potentially shorten their careers by playing through serious injuries. Patrice Bergeron played Game 6 of the 2013 Stanley Cup Final with a punctured lung, a cracked rib and a separated shoulder. In that same series, Marian Hossa was skating on a completely numb foot because of a serious back injury. Playoff hockey is not for the rational and the reasonable.

Now, there was another kind of toughness on display from Draisaitl and his teammates in this game. It’s something less definable, less tangible but every bit as important — the mental toughness to keep battling. After Cale Makar scored just 3:46 into the game, Oilers fans were deathly quiet. Their third-best player, Evander Kane, was in the press box in a finely tailored checkered suit. The writers were all working on their dirges and postmortems. The series was over.

Just not to the 20 guys in navy blue jerseys.

You know all the cliches.

One game at a time, one period at a time, one shift at a time.

You can’t win four games at once.

All the pressure’s on them.

The fourth win is always the hardest to get.

And you roll your eyes every time you hear them, just like when a heavily favored team insists that nobody believed in it, just like when a superstar is hurt and players calmly talk about having as much faith in the “next man up.”

But here’s the thing. They actually believe it. They’re wired differently from us. Whether it’s self-delusion, naivete or an actual unerring self-belief, they really do think just about that next game. And then the next one after that. And the next one after that. And suddenly, it’s Game 7 and anything’s possible.

“We’re the ones playing the game, right?” Oilers defenseman Tyson Barrie said before the game. “You guys can roll your eyes all you want. That’s for you. I’m going to go have my pregame meal and prepare like we do for every game. You don’t play three in a row, you don’t play four in a row; it’s one at a time. For us, it’s just a simple fact of what we’ve been doing all year. We’ll come prepared tonight to win one game. And we know what we’re up against. If you look at the statistics, it’s bleak. But the only way to do it is how we’ve been doing it all year, and that’s one game at a time.”

That was Jay Woodcroft’s message when he first walked into the Oilers’ room as head coach on Feb. 11, a date he mentioned several times Monday morning. The Oilers were 23-18-3 at that point, fifth in the middling Pacific Division and just one point ahead of Seattle and Vancouver. They had just fired coach Dave Tippett. Another year of prime McDavid and Draisaitl was going to waste, and the vultures were circling in the frigid winter winds of Edmonton.

So just win the next game, he said. And then the one after that. And on and on and on.

They won the first five and never looked back.

“That’s been the message since Feb. 11,” Woodcroft said. “You asked about compartmentalizing — that’s chunking things down or breaking it up by pieces. And when you have that ability, which has been ingrained in this team since Feb. 11, you feel good about your options.”

Well, maybe not good, but to the Oilers it seemed possible. Plausible. Doable. When you can do the things these guys can do on a regular basis, the idea of beating the best team in the league four straight times doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Which just makes the failure that much more gut-wrenching.

In the end, the Oilers were simply outclassed. They reached the final four, but ultimately they’ll go down as just one of the 30 teams that didn’t reach the game’s biggest stage, sure to be mostly forgotten by history. Nobody remembers the team that finished fourth.

But Draisaitl — his skill, yes, but more so his will — won’t be soon forgotten. A performance for the ages, a one-legged legacy, will endure.

(Photo: Codie McLachlan / Getty Images)