Oilers wear down Kings’ short bench in Game 4

The Edmonton Oilers won Game 4 against the L.A. Kings in a thrilling fashion Sunday night.

They barely saw the ice in Game 4, those Los Angeles Kings energy forwards and bottom-pairing defenders.

Veteran Trevor Lewis, a two-time Stanley Cup champ a decade ago in Tinseltown, logged five minutes and 19 seconds Sunday night in Edmonton. His linemates Jeff Malott and Samuel Helenius, 2:27 and 1:44 respectively.

• Oilers’ ‘strong belief’ helps them overcome Kings in Game 4 to tie series

The Kings’ third defensive pairing of Brandt Clarke and Jacob Moverare were on the ice for 11:58 and 2:26. Clarke spent 2:15 of his allotment on the power play.

It’s a strategy Los Angeles has been following each game this spring.

All four of the Kings’ top defencemen – Drew Doughty, Mikey Anderson, Joel Edmundson and Vladislav Gavrikov – recorded 30-plus minutes work in an overtime clash on Sunday. Only Evan Bouchard reached those heights on the blueline for the Edmonton Oilers.

Should Kings coach Jim Hiller have played them more against the Oilers with a chance for L.A. to go up three games to one and take a stranglehold in their first-round NHL playoff series?

“I don’t know. Could be,” Hiller told media after Sunday’s game, a 4-3 overtime victory by the Oilers to tie the series at two games each.

“They’ve got a pretty good team. They’ll come at you. I’m sure they didn’t feel very good about us coming at them. They got their legs under us, and they came after us for a while, but they’ve got a pretty good team, so it can happen. It ebbs and flows.”

• Corey Perry doing Corey Perry things helps Oilers square up series with Kings

It ebbed and flowed, all right. And while after two periods after a see-saw battle the Kings held a 3-1 lead, the Oilers flipped the script in the third.

After 40 minutes, the Kings held a 28-15 advantage on the shot clock.

Over the next 38:41 – until Leon Draisaitl deposited the OT winner – it was advantage Oilers, with Edmonton winning the game’s war of whacks. The Oilers fired 48 pucks at goalie Darcy Kuemper compared to the Kings’ 41 at counterpart Calvin Pickard.

As the game wore on, the Oilers – early in the game held to mostly perimeter shots on Kuemper, a Vezina trophy finalist this season as the league’s best goalie – crept closer and closer to the Kings’ crease, with Evan Bouchard connecting twice to tie the game and send it to overtime.

Edmonton head coach Kris Knoblauch said Monday morning before he and the team boarded a flight for L.A., site of Tuesday’s Game 5, that they know the Kings rely heavily on their top nine forwards and first two defensive pairings, while the Oilers have been rolling all their lines and ‘D’ pairs.

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Knoblauch said the Kings getting the last line change after whistles as the home team on Tuesday is “going to be a big part of the game.”

“We know they’re a very strong three-line team. They heavily depend on matching, or they feel very comfortable with that, and when they’re at home, it’s much easier to do that,” he said during a media conference at Rogers Place. “We’re going to find some things that we feel comfortable with, with those matchups and who can go against who.

“The way our game was, how we finished with the four lines that we had, certainly we feel comfortable with any four of our lines playing against any one of theirs, so it’s not that we feel that we have to protect anybody, but I guess it would be more of, ‘How can we free up our offensive guys now?’”

Knoblauch said there are pros and cons to the rolling-all-four-lines approach, the pros including having a more-rested squad while the cons include having the Oilers’ best players on the ice a bit less.

“Your top three lines are your best players. When those players are out regularly, they’re going to contribute more. They feel more involved in the game, and you have your better players on the ice more,” Knoblauch said.

“If the game goes longer, if it’s a physical game or it goes longer, it would fall to our advantage ... We need to not get down early in the games because you can’t always make those comebacks. We’ve been very fortunate to do it a couple times.”