When the Edmonton Oilers abandoned the Northlands Coliseum for their handsome new downtown home eight years ago, the collection of office towers, hotels and restaurants that sprang up around Rogers Place became known collectively as the Ice District.

For the Kings, the name alone has had a chilling effect because Rogers Place is where the team’s last two playoff campaigns started — and both were put on ice in first-round losses to the Oilers.

The Kings were back in Edmonton for the third installment of their postseason trilogy Monday and the first act did not go well, with the Oilers scoring twice in the first 10 minutes on their way to a 7-4 win.

And for Edmonton, it was truly a team effort. Zach Hyman finished with three goals and an assist, Adam Henrique and Leon Draisaitl each had a goal and an assist, Evan Bouchard had four assists and Connor McDavid had five helpers to lead a performance that was as efficient as it was one-sided.

Mikey Anderson and Adrian Kempe each scored in the second period, and Pierre-Luc Dubois and Trevor Moore scored late in the third period for the Kings who, aside from a brief span late in the second period, were overmatched.

It will take at least a week to find out how much that result will mean since the Kings beat the Oilers in the playoff opener in each of the last two seasons, only to lose the series. And the last time the Oilers won the first game of a postseason series, they wound up losing to the Ducks in the second round in 2017.

“It’s a seven-game series,” defenseman Drew Doughty said. “We’re down 1-0, but we can easily make it 1-1 next game. We’ve gotta put that one behind us.

“We’ve got to learn from what we did wrong and fix the things we did wrong. And bring them into the next game. We’ll just have a short memory and be ready to win the next one.”

Nevertheless, for a veteran Kings team featuring 14 players off last season’s postseason roster, it was a troubling start.

The Kings wanted to set the tone and instead they came up flat, conceding the first four goals while giving up 45 shots overall.

The Kings turned shaky after the first five minutes and it didn’t take long for the Oilers to take advantage, with Hyman deflecting a McDavid pass from the edge of the left circle to give Edmonton the lead 6:52 into the game.

On the play, McDavid reached to control a loose puck at the blue line, deking toward the center of the ice, then spinning away from Anderson before passing to Hyman in the slot for a tap-in.

Henrique doubled the Oilers’ lead less than three minutes later, scoring on a wrister from the center of the left circle off an assist from Hyman.

The Kings’ best chance in the first 30 minutes came early in the second period when a turnover in the neutral zone launched Viktor Arvidsson on a breakaway with only Edmonton goalie Stuart Skinner to beat. But his wrist shot was wide of the net, the Oilers controlled the rebound and 20 seconds later Hyman scored again to make 3-0.

Kings Goalie Cam Talbot positions himself to stop a shot by Oilers forward Zach Hyman during the first period of Game 1.

(Curtis Comeau / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

McDavid again set up the goal, this time spinning away from Drew Doughty, who got caught in traffic behind the Kings’ net, and centering the puck to a wide-open Hyman at the bottom edge of the right circle.

“The rushes were just too many,” Doughty said. “We’re letting their top guys get way too much speed and just go through the neutral zone like it’s nothing and it’s tough on the [defense] when those guys are flying.

“So we’ve got to fix that. And we know that we’ll fix it.”

Kings coach Jim Hiller agreed.

“Over the last couple of months of the season when we’ve had a [poor] game, every time we’ve had one of those, we’ve come back with a strong effort,” he said. “So we’re going to have to do that. We’re going to have to be much better than we were tonight, that’s very clear.

“These are things that are fixable for us. I don’t have a good answer as for why we did [that]. But that’s not how we play.”

The Kings, who haven’t won a playoff series in a decade, entered the postseason healthier than they were at any point during the regular season and boasted the NHL’s second-best penalty kill, something they hoped would act as kryptonite to the Oilers’ deadly power play. But even that didn’t work, with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins scoring the first of three power-play goals to make it 4-0 at 8:44 of the middle period.

The rout was on.

Anderson finally got the Kings on the board at 10:56 of the second period, blasting a slap shot past Skinner from between the blue line and left circle, and Kempe made it a two-goal game when he circled behind the net and deflected a shot in off the skate of Oilers defenseman Evan Bouchard with 2:04 left before the second intermission.

But the Kings gave back whatever momentum they had earned when Draisaitl and Hyman scored power-play goals in the opening 6:27 of the final period.

“We talked about our penalties. We talked about their power play so much before this series,” Doughty said. “That shot us in the foot.”

The Kings got a couple of meaningless goals from Dubois and Moore in the final 3:04 late before Warren Foegele closed the scoring for Edmonton with a empty-net goal with 26 seconds to play.

The series continues Wednesday at Rogers Place before moving to Crypto.com Arena for Games 3 and 4 on Friday and Sunday.

Welcome to the Monday Tennis Briefing, where The Athletic will explain the story behind the stories from the last week on court.

This week, the European clay swing kicked off in earnest across the ATP and WTA tours, with tournaments in France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Romania. The four best women’s players faced off in Stuttgart, Barcelona witnessed the return of Rafael Nadal, and we saw a serve from zero gravity.

If you’d like more tennis coverage, please click here.

Are the WTA and ATP tours swapping their metas?

For the past year, there’s been some chatter about a ‘Big Four’ forming in women’s tennis. It was a ‘Big Three’, comprised of Iga Swiatek, Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka, but then Coco Gauff won the U.S. Open and became a seriously consistent presence in the business end of tournaments, including the semi-finals of the Australian Open. She also climbed to No 3 in the rankings. At the same time, the rapid emergence of Carlos Alcaraz, succeeded by the slower burn of Jannik Sinner, Daniil Medvedev being Daniil Medvedev, and the elastic continuity of Novak Djokovic forged new rivalries on the ATP tour.

The last few months have thrown a wrench into that thinking. Despite being without a Grand Slam title since last year’s French Open, Swiatek continues to show every sign of being a dominant world No 1 for a good while. The other three haven’t delivered the kind of consistency that would really justify using a name that has its roots in the Roger Federer/Djokovic/Nadal/Andy Murray dominance of the 2010s.

A decade on, it is easy to forget how often those names landed in the last weekends of the biggest events. Consider 2012: of the 16 semi-final spots in that year’s four Grand Slam tournaments, Murray, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic accounted for 12 of them. Murray, Djokovic and Federer also took three of the semi-final spots at the London Olympics that year.

In Stuttgart last week, a rare mid-level tournament to attract the top four women, it looked like they might pull off a semi-final sweep. But then Marketa Vondrousova beat Sabalenka, and Gauff lost to Marta Kostyuk, with Elena Rybakina winning the tournament.

Next up, Madrid. Maybe the quartet will be the last four standing this time.

What’s behind Andrey Rublev’s eight-set slump?

Good tennis players can see their form nosedive. Right now, it’s Rublev’s turn.

Rublev was world No 5 at the start of the year. He played to his seeding at the Australian Open, but he has been in a bad way since he was defaulted in the final games of a semi-final match in Dubai against Alexander Bublik in February.

Rublev angrily protested a call to a line judge. Another line judge claimed the Russian had used profanity in his native language.

He didn’t.

The tournament officials refused to review tapes before they defaulted Rublev and he was stripped of his ranking points and prize money earned.

The video went viral, and the ATP eventually restored his rankings points and the money he had earned — but the damage had been done. Rublev has won just one match since then, and he has lost to players ranked far lower than he is, including world No 44 Alexei Popyrin and last week, world No 87 Brandon Nakashima, which saw Rublev destroy his racket after losing match point.

The encounters have not been very close either. Rublev has apparently been healthy, but he’s just not playing very well, having dropped eight sets out of 10 since the default in a string of four consecutive defeats.

These stats aren’t awesome, but they aren’t exactly on a decline as steep as his match results. However, take a look at something else…

‘Dominance ratio’ is calculated by dividing the percentage of return points won by the percentage of service points lost. The last time Rublev’s dominance ratio was this low was in 2015, when his ranking high for the year was No 185 in the world and his ranking low was No 438.

Coco Gauff does what Coco Gauff does… for how long?

Gauff gets a ton of accolades for her grit, her competitiveness, her ability to gut out tight matches, especially across three sets.

The American may have all those qualities, but she can also do math.

Gauff has played 25 matches, winning 19 and losing six. Of those 25 matches, eight have gone the distance, and of those eight, she has lost four.

That’s two losses in 17 two-set matches, and four losses in eight three-set matches.

What does all this mean?

Gauff came out on the wrong end of a topsy-turvy match (Alex Grimm/Getty Images)

Sure, her coach Brad Gilbert is the greatest espouser of winning ugly, but it has to include the “winning” part. Gauff pretty much always shows up, and it’s worth remembering that of those two straight-set defeats, one was against Sabalenka in the Australian Open semi-final.

She could still do with being a bit more clinical. As thrilling as it is to watch Gauff fight, as wild as it is to watch her win matches when she is far from her best, slim margins eventually catch up with players. That’s what happened in Stuttgart against Kostyuk, a player Gauff beat in three sets in Australia but who returned the favour in Germany.

It’s a microcosm of the coin flip that her three-setters have become.

GO DEEPER

Listening to women: The slow rise of female tennis coaches

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Stefanos Tsitsipas and Casper Ruud peak — but at the right time?

Tsitsipas and Ruud are two of the best clay court players in the world. Ruud has made the finals of the last two French Opens. Tsitsipas made the one before that. Unfortunately, their opponents in those finals, Nadal and Djokovic, have won a combined 46 Grand Slam titles, 17 of them at Roland Garros.

Still, Tsitispas and Ruud have earned the right to build their clay seasons to peak at the French Open, because both should be alive deep in the tournament and, depending on how the draw breaks, they might have a shot at winning it too.

Ruud took control of this final after a meek performance last week (Joan Valls/Urbanandsport/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The way things are going, they might not have any fuel left in their tanks.

For a second consecutive week, Ruud and Tsitispas met in the finals of a tournament, this time in Barcelona, where Ruud avenged his loss to the Greek in Monte Carlo. It was Ruud’s third event of the clay-court season and Tsitispas’s second, with Madrid and Rome — both competitions just under the level of a Grand Slam — taking up the next four weeks of the calendar before Roland Garros starts. That’s a lot of tennis, even for players in their mid-twenties, such as Ruud and Tsitispas.

Yes, this is the time of year when clay-court standouts try to pile up rankings points and prize money, but is it too much? Djokovic certainly thinks so, at least for him. A master of conserving energy and peaking at the biggest events, Djokovic played Monte Carlo, losing to Ruud in the semis, but he took last week off and has pulled out of Madrid too. He will likely play Rome, then head to Paris — fuel reserves on high.

Kick it, real good

It is a truth universally acknowledged — at least by readers of beloved British children’s author Michael Rosen — that if you can’t go over it or under it, you’ve got to go through it.

Brazil’s raw but rising star Joao Fonseca does not acknowledge this truth.

How high does this go?! 😳

Joao Fonseca’s kick serve bounces OVER Sonego 🚀#TiriacOpen pic.twitter.com/t7X7OOI3CC

— Tennis TV (@TennisTV) April 16, 2024

Recommended reading:

🏆 The winners of the week

🎾 ATP: 

🏆 Casper Ruud def. Stefanos Tsitsipas 7-5, 6-3 to win the Banc Sabadell Open (500) in Barcelona. It is Ruud’s first ATP title above 250 level.
🏆 Jan-Lennard Struff def. Taylor Fritz 7-5, 6-3 to win the BMW Open (250) in Munich. It is Struff’s first ATP title.
🏆 Marton Fucsovics def. Mariano Navone 6-4, 7-5 to win the Tiriac Open (250) in Bucharest. It is Fucsovics’ second ATP title.

🎾 WTA:

🏆 Elena Rybakina def. Marta Kostyuk 6-3, 6-3 to win the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix (500) in Stuttgart, Germany. It is Rybakina’s third title of 2024.
🏆 Sloane Stephens def. Magda Linette 6-1, 2-6, 6-2 to win the Capfinances Rouen Metropole Open (250) in Rouen, France. It is Stephens’ first title since 2022.
🏆 Suzan Lamens def. Clara Tauson 6-4, 5-7, 6-4 to win the Oeiras Ladies Open (125) in Oeiras, Portugal. In a wild final, Tauson was 0-5 down in the second set before winning seven games in a row but Lamens then recovered from 4-1 down in the third by winning five straight games for the title.

📈📉 On the rise / Down the line

📈 Marta Kostyuk moves up six places from No 27 to No 21.
📈 Marton Fucsovics moves up 29 places from No 82 to No 53.
📈 Magda Linette moves up 12 places from No 60 to No 48.

📉 Carlos Alcaraz remains at No 3, but is dropping 1,000 points, wiping out his gap to Daniil Medvedev at No 4.
📉 Karolina Pliskova drops six places out of the top 50, from No 47 to No 53.
📉 Dan Evans drops 20 places from No 49 to No 69.

📅 Coming up

🎾 ATP: 

📍Madrid, Mutua Madrid Open (1000) April 24 — May 5 ft. Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz (..?) Rafael Nadal (..?).
📺 UK: Sky Sports; US: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV
📍Savannah, Savannah Challenger (75) ft. JJ Wolf, Bernard Tomic

🎾 WTA:

📍Madrid, Mutua Madrid Open (1000) April 24 — May 5 ft. Iga Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, Coco Gauff.
📺 UK: Sky Sports; US: Tennis Channel 💻 Tennis TV

Tell us what you noticed this week in the comments as the tours continue.

(Top photos: Alex Grimm/Eric Alonso/Robert Prange/Getty Images)

A wild scene unfolded at Yankee Stadium just five pitches into the game, as home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt tossed New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone from the game. 

However, it appeared a fan screaming toward Wendelstedt triggered the veteran umpire to eject Boone, who had words with him just seconds earlier, from the game. 

After the Oakland Athletics won, 2-0, over the Yankees, Boone spoke with reporters, during which he called Wendelstedt’s move “embarrassing.” He also implied that the Yankees would be contacting Major League Baseball about it. 

The YES Network broadcast caught the moment Boone was ejected, where the manager was pleading with Wendelstedt, pointing to a fan behind the dugout and saying, “I didn’t say a f—ing thing” after he was warned not to speak. 

But Wendelstedt said, “I don’t care who said it. You’re gone!”

UMPIRE ERRONEOUSLY EJECTS YANKEES’ AARON BOONE AFTER FAN YELLS FROM STANDS

The broadcast ended up showing an alternate angle of the moment Boone was ejected, where a fan was seen in the first row just behind the Yankees’ dugout screaming something toward Wendelstedt, who reacted immediately after hearing it. 

Aaron Boone #17 of the New York Yankees argues with third base umpire Marvin Hudson #51 in the first inning during the game against the Oakland Athletics at Yankee Stadium on April 22, 2024 in New York City. (Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

After the game, Wendelstedt told a pool reporter he had not seen a replay of the incident. 

“Apparently what he said was there was a fan right above the dugout,” Wendelstedt said, via MLB.com. “This isn’t my first ejection. In the entirety of my career, I have never ejected a player or a manager for something a fan has said. I understand that’s going to be part of a story or something like that because that’s what Aaron was portraying. I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, had nothing to do with his area, but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.

“Everything you said is exactly kind of what was communicated on the field,” Wendelstedt continued. “That’s what Aaron said. He said that ‘a fan said it, a fan said it.’ I said, ‘I don’t care who said it.’ … It’s foolish to throw out a player if you don’t know who did it.”

Umpire Hunter Wendelstedt on the field during the second inning between the San Diego Padres and the St. Louis Cardinals at Petco Park on April 2, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Brandon Sloter/Getty Images)

While Boone watched the game from the clubhouse, the Yankees’ offense struggled mightily, scattering just three hits. 

The A’s finally got on the board with a two-run homer by Zack Gelof in the top of the ninth inning off Yankees reliever Victor Gonzalez. 

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