If anyone had told me that Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers was going to play 45+ games this season I’d have guessed that Nikolai Khabibulin would be injured and/or drunk.  It wouldn’t really matter who was between the pipes this season, the Oilers would still be embarrassingly awful.  I mean, Shawn Horcoff has got be the saddest excuse for a first-line centre, am I wrong here?  Anyway, the Red Wings blew a four goal lead last night to Edmonton, but still managed to win of course despite the efforts of Deslauriers.  The Drouin Wall made 39 saves including a few that he had no business making.

[s/t to The Big Lead for the clip]

It’s coming together for the Edmonton Oilers.  The Drouin-Wall looked very sharp stopping 40 of the 41 shots he faced from the Nashville Predators, not that he had to make all of those saves as the Oilers’ offense backed him up with six goals.  It was Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers’ first start of the season.

The Predators never had much of a chance after Edmonton piled up four goals in the first period. Pekka Rinne couldn’t stop shit and got the hook after giving up four goals on just nine shots.  Dan Ellis wasn’t much better.  Edmonton rolled to a 6-1 victory to improve to 3-1-1 on the season.

Even with the big night from Drouin-Deslauriers, he wasn’t the busiest Oilers’ player of the night.  Zach Stortini owned the first period, pounding the face of Triston Grant just a minute and a half in.   Stortini then notched a power play goal before finding another hole in Rinne with less than 30 seconds to go in the period.

That’s the first multi-goal game of Stortini’s career.  The fight with Grant was teetering on epic, it’s amazing he had the energy to pot a couple of G’s in the same period.  It’s definitely worth a look:

After watching the Oilers fall in overtime to the Tampa Bay Lightning last night, I was all set to run a post this morning about Edmonton’s highly skilled yet vertically challenged crop of forwards.  Boring story short, I got sidetracked with some shameless promotional stuff on my Raptors’ blog and the good boys at Oilers Nation beat me to the punch.  Not that I’m surprised about that, they’re usually at the top of their game.

So I’m left to scramble this morning with some sort of relevant content.  Sticking with my intended Oilers’ height theme, I give you a classic photo of Mark Messier and one of the greatest little men of all time:

Note the stubby brown one in the hands of the Moose, you don’t see those much anymore.  You see that, see what I just did there?