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Pickard keeps Oilers moving forward with Skinner out
Making his third consecutive start of the season in Edmonton’s nets, with No. 1 Stuart Skinner sidelined with a concussion, Pickard was fantastic Tuesday night in a stunning 3-2 road win by the undermanned Oilers.
LAS VEGAS — Calvin Pickard was a big name in this town once, the first player picked in the Golden Knights expansion draft back in June of 2017.
“A legend. An absolute legend,” he said, playing right along.
The fans? They loved him here, creating a goalie mask that would have been a real keepsake — had he played even a minute of regular season hockey for the Golden Knights.
It’s somewhere in the garage back in Winnipeg now, another keepsake in a long and winding road through seven NHL organizations.
“I got picked up, got here, got a place. Had a decent pre-season — not great,” he recalled on Tuesday night. “But I think it was always their plan to find somebody else on the (waiver) wire. I never landed on my feet here. I was gone by Day 1 of the season.”
Pickard had to wait almost eight years to start a game here at T-Mobile Arena, and it came as an Edmonton Oiler — five organizations removed from his short time as a Golden Knight.
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Making his third consecutive start of the season in Edmonton’s net, with No. 1 Stuart Skinner sidelined with a concussion, Pickard was fantastic Tuesday night in a stunning 3-2 road win by the undermanned Oilers.
Vegas scored first and last, while the Oilers made three second-period goals stand up for an impressive win against a Golden Knights team they could possibly see in Round 2 of the playoffs, if both survive Round 1.
Vegas claimed Pickard off Colorado’s expansion list, then chose Marc-Andre Fleury with their 29th selection. When the Golden Knights claimed goalie Malcolm Subban on waivers from Boston four months later, that was it for Pickard, traded to Toronto for Tobias Lindberg and a sixth-round pick.
Today, 32-year-old Pickard has made an impressive career as that well-liked backup who never complains — who stays out on the practice ice until the last shooter has fired the last puck — the quintessential backup goaler whose disposition is almost as important as his actual position.
“It’s been honestly bothersome over the course of my career, kind of getting labelled as a good guy backup,” he said after making 20 stops in a low-event, grind-it-out game against the gnarly Knights. “I’ve always wanted to be a good goaltender first, and then the fun guy part will take care of itself. But I’ve always believed in myself. And I’ve played a few games in a row here.”
It’s true — you can’t just get by on good looks. Eventually, the starter goes down, and they need you to play every night. Pickard showed Tuesday that he’s up to the task.
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With Vegas goalie Adin Hill on the bench for the extra attacker, Pickard came a mile out of his net to thwart Pavel Dorofeyev as the Russian walked in from the point with all kinds of time.
It was an old-school save, like the two-pad stack he used to beat Calgary 3-2 on Saturday night. The last time we saw an Oilers goalie roam out that far to cut off the angle, he was wearing jersey No. 31.
It was Grant Fuhr, back in the ‘80s.
“It was a pass across, and I had to get out and cut down the angle,” Pickard said. “He was giving me time. He wasn’t shooting it right away. So I just kind of jammed him.
“In a situation like that, you’ve got to find a way to keep the puck out of the net. You know it’s going to be a shot (with the sniper Dorofeyev). It’s probably not going to be a pass in that situation.”
The goalie snobs may sniff at his style, but for anyone who has been around the game for a while, watching Pickard is like a trip back to the 80s, when so many goalies were small and agile. Being a small goalie in 2025, however, is like trying to survive as a Major League pitcher with a fastball that tops out at 88 m.p.h.
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You’ve got to have guile.
“What Picks doesn’t have on the technical side of it, he makes up for it by just reading the play. With his hockey sense,” head coach Kris Knoblauch said. “For him to read that pass, he knew exactly who’s going to be over there. It’s a one-time shot — it’s not that they were going to make a second play. He had to come out and challenge it.”
Viktor Arvidsson’s 12th stood up as the game-winner, surviving a challenge for goaltender interference by Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy. Replays showed there was no interference, but the referee could have blown the play dead before Arvidsson poked the puck in.
“The whistle should have went, right? It’s under his pad,” Cassidy said. “We challenged it — the game clearly wasn’t going our way. A little disappointed with how the whole thing worked out.”
Edmonton dug in from there, in a game where the shots were 22-20, a grinding battle that the Oilers were up to on this night. It’s how you have to play against Vegas, a big, hard team that plays playoff hockey in January.
“We play more of a faster game, and we’ve got to stick to that sometimes too,” Arvidsson said. “But they play a lot like Boston used to play. It’s always a heavy, heavy matchup when you play Boston, too.
“So, for sure, you’ve got to dig down a little bit more and be heavier on your stick.”
