The Cult of Hockey's "Growing pains against Canucks" podcast

What's your good thing?

The official first official cult of hockey player grades of the season and Evan Bouchard grades out a nine.

He was the best Edmonton oiler by far.

And it started early and it continued off.

And that perfect head man to dry sidle in the first period was just a thing of beauty.

An arrow of a wrist shot through a forest of sticks and legs found the bottom corner of the net and tied the game at one.

He took that pass from McDavid, handled it backhand to forehand, then slid it home for the 2-2 goal, and then threaded a wrist shot through his screen for the hat-trick 5-4 goal.

Had two assists as well.

Played 25-41, the game's first star, and my early vote for the Norris Trophy 2026-27.

He was the game's first star and the best player on the ice on either side.

You might want to bump that up to the Hart Trophy, Kurt.

Well, he could win the Rock at Richard at this pace, right? With the hat trick, he's got to be among the team leaders, league leaders at the end of the night.

He really was good.

And of all the Oilers' defensemen, the least mistake-prone.

In terms of creating grade-A shots, he created seven of them, Kurt.

Six at even strength, one on the power play.

He was in on major contributions, and of course, five points also indicates that fairly effectively.

And he just made a mistake on one against, which was not... not that dramatic.

It wasn't a bad one.

Like a lot of the Oilers defensemen had some pretty bad ones.

Kurt, the grade A shots in this game were 20 to 9 for the Oilers, as I saw them.

With the subset of five alarm shots, these are the most dangerous shots.

13 to 5 for the Oilers.

And they lost.

So this is probably expected goals like 5-2.