Utah gets here off a short turnaround. The Mammoth beat Toronto 5-4 in Salt Lake City on Tuesday in their first home game after a 5-game road trip, scoring 4 times in the 2nd period and then hanging on through a 3rd period that went 2-0 to the Leafs. Now they're back on a plane to Alberta with 1 day in between. Edmonton is coming home from California, so both teams are dealing with travel in their own way.
The Mammoth's form comes in big swings. They opened by outscoring their first 2 opponents 10-1, with Dylan Guenther, Nick Schmaltz, Logan Cooley, Clayton Keller and Mikhail Sergachev all piling up points. Then Boston hammered them 6-1, and they answered by beating Buffalo 4-1. When Utah is good, the scoring comes from everywhere. When it isn't, the gap is ugly. The Leafs win showed both sides in a single night: a dominant 2nd period, then a 3rd period where they were mostly holding on.
Utah's own injury list is short. Michael Carcone is week-to-week with an upper-body injury and Maveric Lamoureux is on IR, and the rest of the core is healthy. Edmonton's list reaches into the middle of the lineup. That has pushed depth guys like Owen Michaels, who has won 60.0% of his faceoffs, into real defensive-zone minutes. The question for Thursday is pretty simple. Can Utah's 4 lines wear down an Oilers group running thin behind McDavid, or does McDavid make the depth chart irrelevant again? So far this season the second answer has been winning.